


The Cop and the Cryptid

by ckret2



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Autistic Prowl, Autistic Soundwave, Cryptids, Episodic Plot, Established Relationship, Fade to Black, Fluff, Ghosts, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mental Instability, Mnemosurgery, Mystery, Neurodiversity, No Smut, No War AU, Paranormal Investigators, Political Intrigue, Poltergeists, Pre-War, Psychic Abilities, Relationship turmoil, Sparkeaters, Supernatural Elements, Tags To Be Added As Relevant In Future Chapters, Telepathy, Vampires, like it's the canon pre-war 'ALL romance is taboo' thing but it sounds the same
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-09-24 18:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 132,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20363200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Prowl: the rational skeptic with a history in crime scene investigation. Mesothulas: the wide-eyed believer who's mastered—or at least dabbled in—every field of science under the sun. Together, they're Iacon's leading paranormal investigators. ... With a few twists.Twist #1: Both are stone cold skeptics, with Mesothulas only playing the believer for their clients—allowing them to become wildly successful as paranormaldebunkers.Twist #2: They don't quite disbelieve ineverything; they both know more than they'd let on about the Iaconian Spindleback, a local cryptid with an eight-legged alt-mode. Twist #3: They're about to learn that there are more true paranormal things on Cybertron than just the Spindleback.





	1. Case 1: Mirage and the Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the [@tfbigbang](http://tfbigbang.tumblr.com) event. Check out all the other great works that have gone up so far! Writers and artists were paired together—writers wrote fanfics and artists contributed fanart based on the fics—so I'll be linking my artists' works once they're up. I'll be posting one 10k-word chapter per week, each Friday, until the whole fic is posted. Follow me on tumblr or AO3 to keep up with updates!
> 
> NOTE ON TIME UNITS: Whenever any time unit is used—i.e., "half a million years"—consider it a handy translation from Neocybex into English, so nobody has to do any Cybertronian-unit-to-Earth-unit mental math in the middle of a fic: this includes "days," "hours," "minutes," etc. A Cybertronian "month" should be interpreted as adhering far more rigidly to the (Luna Two) lunar cycle than Earth months adhere to our lunar cycle. _The only exception:_The word "cycle" refers, specifically, to a Cybertronian year, which is much longer than an Earth year but not clearly defined in fic. Think centuries. That's it that's all you've gotta keep track of!

"This entire precinct is going down the tubes," Prowl muttered. He was unsubtly leaning back in his chair, once again, to look out the mechaforensics divison's door, _once again_, at the so-called "investigator" down the hall talking to Flatfoot.

The "investigator" had been called in to weigh in on a _monster hunt_. There had been reports in the city of some monstrous creature dubbed "the Spindleback," named for the half-to-two-dozen thread-spinning spindles that "witnesses" claimed stuck out of its hunched back. It was a ludicrous imaginary thing—said to be small enough to fit in an average bot's hand and/or twice the height of a shuttle, and inclined to using its spindles to spin massive quantities of sticky binding thread that _somehow_ never made its way to any forensics lab in Iacon—and yet, despite its obvious status as an urban legend, it had made its way onto the suspect list of five different ongoing property damage investigations.

"This—" Prowl gestured with a flourish at the "investigator," ignored that he turned in Prowl's direction, and leaned forward to mutter across his desk at Tumbler, "_this_ is indicative of the slackening investigative standards and mental laziness that's been taking over the _entire department_. I've been begging Flatfoot for an up-to-date mass spectrometer for _ages_ so I can analyze chemical samples in-house instead of sending them to that backed up lab across town, and what's he spending our funding on instead? A _ghost hunter_, of all things. Is this what laxer Functionist law is going to lead to?" Prowl reconsidered his wording, decided he sounded a little _too_ Petrexian, and went on, "Don't get me wrong, I have _no_ problem with people switching to new fields that they're ready and able to develop an _expertise_ in—but now people are just declaring themselves experts in fields that _don't even exist_. And they're not only making money off of the public's gullibility, but also sucking _decorated enforcers_ who should _know better_ into playing along with the charade. It's an _embarrassment_."

Tumbler, whom Prowl had been interrupting off and on for the past two hours to complain about the ghost hunter, set his datapad down with a loud click, propped his chin in his hand, and for the seventh time looked at Prowl. "You _know_," he said, in that voice that Prowl recognized a little too well as the one that Tumbler used when he was about to say something that he knew was going to insult Prowl and planned to scold Prowl for being insulted by it: "nobody's proven the Spindleback _doesn't_ exist. How do we know it _isn't_ actually out there, but hasn't been caught on camera yet? _You_ should try to keep an open mind."

For a moment, Prowl's mouth worked with the effort to hold back an array of _extremely_ impolite words he considered beneath himself and his vocabulary, and that Tumbler would only give him scrap for if he _did_ say. Finally, in a low voice, he snapped, "My mind is _plenty_ open—to any and every field that has even a _shred_ of credibility to back it up."

Tumbler shrugged noncommittally.

"But let's get this straight," Prowl said. "I hate the myth- and rumor-based pseudoscience that is called 'paranormal' 'investigation,'" he gave each word an individual set of finger quotes, "I hate the anti-intellectualism the field engenders by pretending that believing something in the _explicit absence_ of proof is somehow intellectually superior to reserving belief for evidence, and I _personally and individually_ hate that _ignorant_ oil stain out there."

"Look on the bright side," Tumbler said. "If he doesn't help Flatfoot find the Spindleback—"

"Which he _won't_."

"—then you'll never see him again."

###

Mesothulas thought Flatfoot's wide-opticked credulity was cute, in a pitiable way. He was an enforcer, wasn't he? Surely he had to sort out the testimony of unreliable witnesses and lying suspects every day of his life? And yet, apparently, the moment the word "monster" entered the conversation, he was ready and eager to believe just about everything any supposed witness said—even if two different witnesses swore up and down they'd seen the same purportedly unique local cryptid on opposite sides of the city at the same time, as was the case with a couple of testimonies Flatfoot had shown Mesothulas so far. (The testimonies were already blurring together in his mind, and he _certainly_ wasn't writing down or recording any of them; which was fine, because he'd already decided they were all rubbish.)

He'd point out the contradiction later—after he'd wowed Flatfoot a bit more with his far larger repertoire of Spindleback eyewitness testimonies.

From the corner of his optics, he caught sight of someone emphatically gesturing at him through an open doorway. His gaze lingered just a moment, optics narrowing slightly, although the enforcer was now putting on a good show of ignoring him completely.

Flatfoot followed Mesothulas's gaze, and sighed wearily. "Oh. That's one of mine. Prowl—of _Petrex_." He pronounced the name of the staunchly Functionist town with pointed emphasis. "I'd—I wouldn't worry about talking to him, if I were you. He's not involved with these cases."

"I think I noticed him giving me a death glare when I came in," Mesothulas said lightly. "Unless you've got another who looks like him." It was possible. This Prowl's frame model was one of three or four cold constructed models often derisively referred to as "army-builders"—generic, identical, and uniform, like disposable soldiers. His was the "mix-and-match" army-builder frame: a single base body that could have half a dozen kibble configurations slapped on that looked nearly identical, but could yield a car, hovercar, sub, boat, jet, or helicopter for an alt-mode. And while most army-builders opted for new paint jobs or kibble as soon as they could get them, Prowl's was clearly unchanged from his fresh-from-the-factory monotone. There _could_ be another one in the precinct.

"No, I'm sure it was him," Flatfoot said wearily. "Sorry about him. He's... nnnot... thrilled, about having a professional paranormal investigator assisting the department."

"You don't say." Even from here, Mesothulas could see his back kibble bobbing as he moved and gesticulated at someone in some unheard tirade.

Mesothulas had to admit—even though they made up much of his livelihood, the sworn believers like Flatfoot sometimes tired him with their unquestioning credulity. But in comparison, the sworn nonbelievers were absolutely exhausting. _Especially_ the ones like Prowl—oh, Mesothulas knew his type. He could peg his sort from twenty paces: one of those agonizingly ignorant mass-produced cops who were chucked out to patrol the streets as soon as their enforcer decals had adhered to their chests. The ones that barely had a competent grasp of the laws they were sworn to uphold, _much less_ the laws that govern nature, chemistry, physics, or reality itself. The closed-minded ones that stubbornly and dully refused to believe in _anything_ they couldn't beat with a shock baton unless they were instructed to believe by the Senate or Council.

Here Mesothulas was, doing brilliant science-based investigative work, revolutionizing a field languishing in the realm of urban legend, inventing methods to document hitherto-unknown natural phenomena and in the process unravel millennia of superstitions, and that _dull_ fool over there probably wouldn't understand what the phrase "hitherto-unknown natural phenomena" meant if he had a dictionary to help him.

In fact, he probably wouldn't be able to understand _half_ of what Mesothulas did and would be proud to say so, like lacking a proper scientific understanding of the world was something admirable. It was disgusting, all the mechs in this precinct who'd scoffed or scowled when Mesothulas had been introduced to them—all these enforcers who'd been assigned to _protect_ people, displaying such egregious, sneering anti-intellectualism.

No matter. Mesothulas turned back to Flatfoot, optics curved in a smile. "Well. If _he_ hasn't seen the Spindleback, then I'm not concerned with what he thinks about it. You were telling me about the witness statements of those who _have_ seen it?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. This next one comes from three nights later..."

Mesothulas consulted his mental calendar, decided it couldn't possibly be a legitimate sighting, and dismissed it without hearing another word, still nodding along and looking interested at the right moments. He was here to do a job, and he would _continue_ to do it, regardless of what any mass-made uneducated dolts thought about it.

And anyway, Mesothulas would never see Prowl again.

###

**Case 1: Mirage and the Ghost**

###

Prowl and Mesothulas both groaned when their morning alarm clock went off. Prowl tightened his arms around Mesothulas's back, as though if he clung tightly enough the alarm would give up and go away.

"Geddit," Mesothulas mumbled directly into Prowl's shoulder.

"You're on top." And quite thoroughly so; both of Mesothulas's legs were wrapped firmly around one of Prowl's, and he was sprawled across Prowl's waist to press his face into Prowl's opposite shoulder.

Mesothulas whined sleepily.

Without turning on his optics, Prowl squirmed and shifted them both across the recharge slab, knocking a few stray datapads off in the process, until he could stretch his hand onto the nightstand. He groped around blindly until he found the alarm, and slapped the snooze button.

They both sighed with relief. Prowl let his arm go slack, hand hanging over the edge of the slab.

All was still and peaceful. The early morning air drifting in through the cracked open window above their berth was cool and sweet, and the stars that hadn't been beaten back by the streetlights below were just beginning to fade in the light of the coming dawn. Prowl pulled his arm back up to drape it across Mesothulas's back. Mesothulas nuzzled his face more securely into the joint between Prowl's shoulder and torso. The hum of their straining slab, rigged to recharge two bodies at once, didn't quite cover the faint sounds of Iacon's pre-rush hour midtown traffic; but the traffic noises just faded into—

Prowl bolted upright. "We're supposed to be ghost hunting today!" Mesothulas yelped, flailed, and flung an arm around Prowl's neck for balance.

Prowl tried to get off the slab. At some point during the night, he and Mesothulas must have rolled over each other a couple of times and gotten entangled with the recharge cables plugged from the slab into their backs; when he attempted to stand, Mesothulas came with him, and they tumbled in an unbalanced mess to the floor.

"_Ow_—damn it, Prowl—" Mesothulas's grumblings were interrupted as his optics fell on one of a dozen datapads that had been scattered under their slab by the collapse. "Oh, _that's_ where that went." He reached over Prowl's face to retrieve the datapad on Titan sightings and slid it behind his chest armor.

Fifteen minutes later, they were down the street, speeding toward downtown and a neighborhood of penthouses for the rich and semi-powerful. Mesothulas was weaving vaguely back and forth in his lane behind Prowl.

"Are you reading that datapad?"

"_No_! Of course not. That would be _wrong_," Mesothulas said, distractedly. "... But if I was, I'd probably ask you if you knew that rumor has it there's a still living Titan—"

"Mesothulas."

"—somewhere beneath Nyon, or so local oral history has it—"

"_Mesothulas_."

"—enmeshed with the underground infrastructure so thoroughly that you can't even tell the Titan apart from the surrounding—"

"Mesothulas! Unplug the datapad and focus on driving!" Prowl slowed to a stop at a traffic light; Mesothulas narrowly slammed on the brakes in time to avoid rear-ending him. After a pause, Prowl asked, "How do they know the Titan's there if they can't tell it apart from the infrastructure?"

"I just _said_. Local oral history." Mesothulas edged into the narrow gap between Prowl and the next car over to speak to him in a faux conspiratorial whisper: "It's _fascinating_, the tales. Hallways shifting in the night to disorient underground travelers—mechs with Signs of Affinity claiming to commune with the Titan in their dreams—"

"So, baseless regional urban legends."

Mesothulas giggled delightedly at Prowl's skepticism, leaned over to tap his side, and straightened up to zoom ahead of Prowl as their light turned green. "You _must_ read it after me—I _insist_—and give me your educated opinion then."

They felt a slight bump as the street texture below them changed, and the sound of the street passing under their tires suddenly grew quieter; higher-quality paving materials were used in neighborhoods like this to dull traffic noise. The matte black streets didn't even shine in the rain. Above, the east-facing windows of a couple of luxury high-rise apartments sparkled in the sunrise as though the glass were speckled with diamonds.

Today's client: one Mirage, demonym not provided. Those with enough wealth tended, eventually, to cluster in the nicer parts of Iacon and its largest neighboring polities, and people who lived in such neighborhoods moved in circles that didn't need to name their cities. And anyway, Prowl and Mesothulas found that these wealthy clients had more culturally in common with each other regardless of their origin cities than they did with the less affluent citizens of wherever they'd come from. In Prowl's meticulously maintained client files, he marked down their rich customers who didn't provide demonyms as "of the Towers."

Mesothulas, who'd been doing this longer than Prowl and had done a few more jobs with rich clients than him, found that the rich generally believed in the exact same supernatural and paranormal phenomena as anyone else. The main difference was that they tended to call a paranormal investigator to check out a suspected specter or sparkeater much sooner after the phenomenon's first appearance than the poorer customers did; likely because they had the money to get the problem looked at, whereas others would rather wait to see if the problem resolved itself than spend money on experts of dubious credibility. Consequently, rich clients tended to call more often about problems that could be solved in about ten minutes. This would likely be an easy job.

Mirage suspected there was a ghost in his den. About seventy percent of their cases were suspected ghosts. Prowl had all their standard ghost hunting equipment strapped to his roof racks with bungee cords, in two containers that sat on either side of his long-unused light bar.

Mirage's high-rise apartment was a massive hexagonal building in an old part of the neighborhood, with windows that slanted back and forth in zigzags that Prowl automatically disliked the look of just for not being perfectly vertical. As they turned off the street and onto the building's courtyard, gold-colored gravel crunched under their tires. Prowl transformed and reached over one shoulder to make sure the cords holding their equipment to his roof rack were still stable, and Mesothulas skidded in a half circle around Prowl as he transformed back to root mode.

As they passed between two fountains on their approach to the front double door, the door sent a short-range ping to their comms requesting a clearance code to enter. Prowl pinged it back with the one day access code Mirage had provided them. He nodded vaguely to the intimidatingly large door mech—professional courtesy from one mech who'd been in a protection-oriented line of work to another—while Mesothulas darted ahead to the middle of the lobby, gaze roving around as he took in the sights.

When Prowl caught up, Mesothulas murmured, "It looks new. Doesn't it?" All the decor, from elaborately wrought steel furniture to marble columns and wall molding, was modern. Even though the tile flooring felt soft, it was polished and barely chipped.

"The building's about a hundred thousand years old," Prowl said.

"_Huh._ I wouldn't have guessed it was even five thousand. I wonder when they last did an extensive remodel?"

Before they could discuss the architecture further, one of the lifts at the curved end of the lobby opened, and a slender blue speedster emerged, waving. "Hello! Mesothulas and Prowl, I presume? Which—?"

"I'm Mesothulas." He hurried forward to meet the speedster, taking his hand to shake. "A pleasure to meet you—Mirage, I assume?"

"Yes—then you must be Prowl?"

"Hello." After a slight delay, Prowl noticed Mirage's extended hand and shook it.

"Delighted to meet you both. I kept seeing your names pop up when I was looking for experts to call in. All high praise. You seem to be the biggest names in your field; I'm very grateful you were able to fit me in on such short notice."

"Alas, we're the most frequently published, but not the most frequently demanded," Mesothulas said. "The consequences of focusing on education instead of entertainment."

"The most popular investigators are the ones you see on television," Prowl added.

"Either way, I'm grateful to you for coming so soon," Mirage said, as he led them back toward the lift. "Especially so early in the morning. I expect you do most of your work at night?"

"Less than you might think," Mesothulas said, walking side-by-side with Mirage as Prowl trailed a step behind, looking around to measure and memorize the lobby. "At a minimum, we tend to do our initial consultations during the day—although, yes, we do tend to spend at least one night to observe any phenomena that only manifest in the dark. _Does_ your phenomenon exclusively manifest at night, then? Or is—"

"Not in the lobby," Prowl said.

"Oh, of course—my apologies, Mirage." Mesothulas offered Mirage a curved-optic smile, and said more quietly, "We _do_ pride ourselves on our discretion; but sometimes I get a bit ahead of myself."

Mirage threw a relieved glance over his shoulder at Prowl—which Prowl, who probably hadn't registered a facial expression without significant study and contemplation in the past five hundred years, didn't notice—then returned his attention to Mesothulas. "I appreciate it. Not that anyone in this tower is a terrible gossip, but... you know how unseemly rumors take on a life of their own." _Unseemly,_ as though Mirage considered a ghost in the den on the same level as having rust in the wash rack walls or scraplets in the kitchen. Was exorcising a ghost a matter of apartment hygiene to him?

As the lift door shut behind him, Prowl said, "You look familiar. Have we met?"

"Oh?" Mirage tapped the button for the fifteenth floor and glanced back to study Prowl's face and frame. "I'm afraid I can't place you." Few people could. Since he'd removed his enforcer decals, he was so generic-looking that his appearance very nearly looped back around to remarkable _because_ of how overwhelmingly generic he was.

Prowl asked, "Have you ever had any encounters with the police?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Mesothulas quickly inserted himself between the two, laughing awkwardly. "I'm sorry, I'm sure he didn't mean it like that. He used to work as an enforcer, you see. In Iacon and Kaon."

"And Petrex."

Mirage studied him again, and asked hesitantly, "In Sentinel Prime's Security Services?"

"That's right."

Mirage nodded more confidently. "Yes, I spend about half the cycle in Kaon. Sometimes Sentinel Prime would provide security at larger parties."

"Yes, at Senator Ratbat's request. Did I overhear you talking about turbofox hunting once?"

Mirage beamed. "I'm quite a successful sport hunter. I've got a clever little trick that lets me creep right up on them without their noticing a thing. My only worry is about making sure I don't accidentally approach from upwind. If only I had doors like yours—" The lift stopped, thankfully sparing both Prowl and Mesothulas from any more hunting talk.

"This way." They received another short-range ping, which apparently Mirage answered, because the door slid open. The lights flipped on; to the left was a sitting area with a half circle of couches surrounding a low crystal cocktail table with seams suggesting it could be lifted and expanded into a full table. Beyond it was a wall of windows—not much of a view, though, looking out on another building next door. A hologram TV projector sat in the ceiling, disguised as part of a multicolored light fixture. To the right was a kitchen bar in front of a cabinet with an impressive array of drinks. Prowl's head turned slowly from left to right as he methodically scanned the room; Mesothulas's gaze bounced from the couches, to the lights, to the bar, and he murmured, "Oh, lovely."

Mirage gestured to the couches, "Please." Mesothulas sat with his back to the windows; Prowl passed the couches completely and knelt by the windows, unstrapping their supplies from the racks on his back.

"So," Mesothulas said. "You mentioned in your initial communication that you have a ghost problem. Of course, 'ghost' is something of an umbrella term; there's a broad variety of phenomena that fall in the category—wandering sparks, data ghosts, et cetera..."

Mirage had sat across from Mesothulas, but was leaning to the side and craning his neck to try to see Prowl. "Oh—don't worry about him," Mesothulas said. "He's just unloading some equipment that helps us narrow down the precise location and nature of supernatural phenomena. Cold spot detectors, voice phenomenon recorders, atmospheric fluctuation sensors..."

"There's usually EMF meters too, right?" Mirage asked with the earnestness of a mech who'd occasionally watched a ghost hunting special and therefore thought he could keep up with an expert.

"We don't usually have cause to pull them out. Prowl's got something of a... shall we say, a sixth sense for EMFs," Mesothulas said, one optic flickering in a wink. Ducked below the back of the couch, Prowl shook his head, grimacing. Mirage, however, looked duly impressed. "Now, as I was saying: there are quite different ways that the various and sundry phenomena commonly called 'ghosts' can manifest. If you start by describing what precisely you've experienced, it can help us narrow down the options."

Mirage nodded. "Yes, of course. Well, the primary evidence of its presence is a—a wailing."

Mesothulas nodded slowly. "A wailing?" He slid out a datapad from behind his chest armor, and started typing in careful notes. "Describe it."

"Echoey, rises and falls—sometimes more of a howl. I feel as though it's trying to say something, but it's always unintelligible. It seems like it's coming from right beside me and from far off at the same time," Mirage said. "I only hear it in the den, at night."

Standing with a piece of equipment in each hand and a third strapped around one forearm, Prowl asked, "Which wall is the den against? Here?" He gestured at the wall of windows. "What are the air currents like between the neighboring building and this one?"

Affronted, Mirage asked, "You think it's just the _wind_?"

Mesothulas flailed a shushing gesture at Prowl, who quickly shut his mouth. Forcing a laugh, Mesothulas said, "I'm terribly sorry, he's got a background in crime scene investigation. Sometimes he defaults back to—you know..." Mesothulas shot a glance at Prowl over his shoulder. "Why don't you check out the rest of the apartment?"

"Right."

Only slightly mollified, Mirage gestured toward a door in the kitchen area. "The den where the ghost can be heard is that way. _Not_ against any exterior walls."

Prowl nodded and, without another word, headed back to the den.

When the door had shut, Mesothulas said, "I really _do_ apologize for him. I confess, he can be a tad skeptical—but, he's _very_ good with the equipment, and he does have quite a gift for EMFs. So..." He shrugged helplessly.

"Well. If he's _that_ helpful," Mirage said. "In any case, I'm sure he'll be a believer once he actually _hears_ the thing."

"Let's get back to discussing it," Mesothulas said. "Have you ever noticed any other signs of it, besides the wailing?"

"No. Well, some small objects moving—but I think that might have been because of the volume."

Mesothulas paused at that, but made a note in his datapad and moved on. "Hauntings are often tied to a place, but sometimes tied to a person. Have you ever experienced this wailing anywhere other than this apartment?"

"No, just that den. I've heard it a couple of times from the kitchen or wash rack—muffled, of course—but nowhere else."

"Most likely tied to the location, then..." Mesothulas made another note. "How long have you been hearing it?"

"About half a month, now."

"Is that as long as you've lived here?"

"Oh, goodness no! I've lived here, oh... three, four centuries now? I got back from Kaon three months ago."

"Oh? So this wasn't a pre-existing phenomenon. That reduces the odds that it was somebody who died in the apartment before you moved in."

"'Reduces'? Not 'eliminates'?"

Mesothulas looked up from his datapad and shook his head. "Sometimes it takes a long time for a ghost to manifest after the event that created it. _Usually_ it's immediate, yes, but a great deal of outside factors control it. We're going to cover some of those possibilities next, actually. Has anything happened lately that might have stirred up or disturbed an otherwise dormant entity—a restructuring or redecorating of the rooms that it might have remembered from its former life here, apartment maintenance that may have disturbed its hiding spot...?" When Mirage opened his mouth to answer, Mesothulas held up a hand to pause him. "Any detail, no matter how small, could be relevant. I've seen ghosts stirred up because an electrician rewired a room—can you imagine?—just because suddenly the ghost had more access to ambient energy it could absorb and use to make itself known."

Mirage propped his chin in his hand, brow furrowed. "Nothing recent. I had my apartment remodeled almost a century ago, but I'd think that anything stirred up by that would have made itself known much longer ago?"

Mesothulas nodded. "There's always the remote possibility of freak circumstances, but yes, almost definitely."

"And I haven't noticed any other work being done in the building."

"Then perhaps it's a spirit of more recent vintage. Have you noticed anything that might indicate someone died in this building recently? Visitors with blackened biolights, hushed conversations, possessions discreetly being removed from an apartment?"

Mirage's optics lit up. "Yes, actually. I didn't see possessions being _removed,_ but a little less than a month ago I _did_ see movers carrying boxes up the emergency stairs rather than the lifts. Someone must have been moving in quietly—which must mean that someone _else_ had recently moved _out_ in some fashion, wouldn't you say?"

"An astute deduction." Mesothulas scribbled down another note. "Definitely worth investigating. But to keep our options open before we get locked into one theory: there's also a possibility that this is a ghost that was originally attached to somebody _else,_ but may have drifted over to your apartment due to negative energy."

"Does that happen?"

"From time to time. Think of an environment with negative energy as a valley: it's easy for spirits to roll downhill into one from a position of higher, positive energy. If you've had any arguments lately, made any enemies, and some ghost was attached to _them,_ that lingering negative energy might have let it roll downhill onto you, to be released when you got home."

Mirage looked thunderstruck by the suggestion. "I've never heard such a thing."

"Most people haven't. The public is woefully undereducated about supernatural phenomena, I'm afraid. But, that's what we're here to help with." A smile.

"I don't have any enemies that I know of. I got in a couple of petty arguments back in Kaon—a bit too much high grade might have been involved. Would that do it?"

"Probably not, but you never know with these things until you've investigated." Mesothulas readied himself to type again. "Describe them to me."

###

Prowl waited until the den door slid shut, then got to work. The room was small for a den: it was longer than it was wide, and a desk anchored into the back wall with nothing on it filled over a quarter of the space. A few high shelves stored some personal possessions, mainly trophies. A digital picture frame flashed through selfies of Mirage with various nobles and politicians whom Prowl recognized but couldn't name. Prowl critically eyed the framed diploma from the Jhiaxian Academy of Advanced Technology, and then the utter lack of datapads on the shelves. Did Mirage not _read_? How'd he graduate from such a prestigious school?

Prowl visually scanned and memorized the exact dimensions of the room and its contents, then got to work with the tools in each hand. Prowl waved the "cold spot detector"—he'd had to suppress a snort when Mesothulas called it that—the _thermometer_ through the room, meticulously measuring every cubic foot, recording any potential fluctuations in the temperature that might be accounted for by drafts or misaimed air conditioning vents.

And then he repeated the thorough scanning process with a laser velocimeter designed to track the speed and direction of air currents in the room—"atmospheric fluctuation sensor," _hah_. The remote-shaped device formed a thin green laser bubble from its tip, and Prowl watched as translucent green swirls of light curled through the bubble, showing how the air was moving inside of it. This was, far and away, Prowl's favorite toy to play with.

Today, though, he got to try a new one out. He'd added it to his chest of supplies a couple of months ago, but this was the first case they'd had since then with unexplained sounds. It was designed based on a sonar camera that used echolocation to measure the dimensions of an enclosed space; but instead, it measured the acoustics of a space, making a map of the precise ways sound bounced around, where it echoed, where it was absorbed. _Supposedly_, anyway. Time to see if it lived up to its hype.

Prowl popped open his outer thigh compartments—where he used to carry his guns when he'd been an enforcer—stowed the thermometer and laser velocimeter away, and held up the wrist he'd strapped his new acoustic analyzer around. After examining its buttons and display for a moment, he clicked the power button and tapped "start" on the display, and watched as eight marble-sized drones whizzed out of the device and hovered in a cube formation in front of him.

A readout on the acoustic analyzer counted down from ten; and then the marbles let out a discordant series of chirps, each one a different tone. They zoomed around the room, chirping all the while, each following a seemingly-random swooping trajectory that prevented them from colliding with each other that even Prowl had difficulty tracking. After half a minute, the wrist device again counted down from ten. The marbles stopped and then returned to their spots. A projection of the room, Prowl included, hovered over the display, done up in different colors like a heat map—but indicating what? How well sounds... bounced, maybe?—with hundreds of shimmery white waves traveling through the image to, undoubtedly, show how sound was moving. Prowl didn't understand acoustics _nearly_ well enough to make sense of the model. He watched it for several long seconds, mouthed the word "_wow_," and turned off the projection. Okay. New favorite toy.

On to the most boring.

Mesothulas was vastly off the mark to suggest Prowl had some form of EMF-related ESP. (Although Prowl was grateful that, if Mesothulas was going to make _any_ inaccurate claims about Prowl's abilities, at least he'd agreed to stick to that one. At one point he'd brainstormed claiming that Prowl's unusual sensory abilities were because of his atypical processor operating system, which Prowl had sternly informed Mesothulas was nobody's business but his doctor's.) However, ESP or no, it _was_ true that Prowl was more sensitive than the average mech to electromagnetic fields—or his doors were, anyway. His frame model was considered _the_ prototypical cold constructed body type, designed with easily replaceable mix-and-match alt-mode kibble that could let the same base frame turn into a car as easily as a submarine. Everyone sharing his frame had been designed to passively detect electromagnetic fields and air currents with their doors, for the benefit of those plugging in wings to serve as jets, hovercraft, or helicopters. And beyond that, when he went to work with Mesothulas he'd received mods to enhance his EMF sensitivity.

Because of that, he and Mesothulas usually didn't bother with other EMF sensors when checking out a new location; Prowl and his doors were usually more than adequate. Just wandering the den, he'd passively picked up most of the electrical wiring in the walls—and also an unusually strong EM field coming from under the desk. He knelt to check underneath; there was something that looked like the kind of unusually heavy-duty wall socket designed for a recharge slab.

It took him a minute of puzzled examination, but Prowl figured out how to unfold the desk into a recharge slab. Unfolding it forced Prowl back until the end of the slab was pressed into his thighs and his light bar was flush against the door into the kitchen. Huh. Odd thing to put in a den, especially one so small. He refolded the slab into a desk.

He opened the door and leaned out, hand on the doorframe. "Is this den also a guest recharge chamber?"

Mesothulas perked up. "That would open all sorts of new possibilities."

"No, that's my own recharge slab," Mirage said. "Tight quarters, I know, but it hardly matters when you're asleep." Smugly, he added, "You should see the wash rack, though. It's through the other door in there."

Prowl leaned back into the den and opened the door. "_Oh._" He paused. "This is going to take a while."

Mesothulas said, "I'll help. We ought to compare notes anyway." He turned to Mirage. "Thank you for your helpful information. You're welcome to wait out here while we check out the wash rack—as romantically gothic as it may sound, scanning for cold spots is actually quite tedious work."

Mirage nodded. "Let me know if you need anything else. You can also reach the wash rack through here." He gestured at a nearly concealed door against the wall where the ceiling projector was pointed.

Mesothulas tapped it to slide it open, looked into the wash rack, and murmured, "By Vector Sigma." Mirage chuckled.

The wash rack was massive, and obscenely luxurious: by the wall-filling window, a tub large enough to hold several mechs; movable arch- and column-shaped pipes covered in soap-spraying nozzles; multiple hoses for more detailed washing; a trough on one side of the room with removable dividers to be filled with even more soaps, shampoos, and waxes; and a large closet—which Prowl was currently going through—full of sponges, towels, brushes, and dozens of cleaning products.

"All the luxuries of a public bath house, without the public. Compacted, of course," Mirage said, which said more about what kind of over-the-top public bath houses were being built in the neighborhoods Mirage hung out in than it did anything else. "It's quite a draw for parties. But I haven't been able to host them like I used to with all the midnight racket."

"What's this material?" Mesothulas was balancing on the tips of his feet to brush his fingers through the fibers of a large cylindrical brush currently stored against the ceiling. "It doesn't feel like plastic. If it _is_, it's very fine."

"Excellent optic. It's real fabric—imported, naturally. It's made of—what was it? Some kind of blanket an animal builds around itself when it wants to grow bigger—"

"A cocoon?"

"That's the word! The cocoon is harvested for thread. That brush took nearly a million to make. It's the most expensive piece of equipment in there."

"Extraordinary—"

Prowl put a hand on Mesothulas's shoulder as he passed, then leaned out the door. "If you'll excuse us, we should get to work before he gets any more distracted." Mesothulas huffed, amused.

Mirage said, "You're not impressed by much, are you, Prowl?"

He considered the question. "I'm impressed a normal amount. I'm just disinclined to demonstrate it."

"You'd get on well in politics."

Prowl hesitated, nodded sharply in acceptance, and shut the door. He turned to Mesothulas and asked quietly, "Was that an insult or a compliment?"

"A mildly irritated compliment, I think." Mesothulas was now over by the wall-covering window. "He's saying your political opponents would find you difficult to read. Look at the railing outside the window, and the latches here—the windows are actually glass doors."

"Slanted glass doors," Prowl said disapprovingly.

"I think the wash rack has a retractable balcony."

"Why would a wash rack have a balcony?"

"For the ludicrous joy of it?"

Prowl decided that sounded sensible enough for this neighborhood, and shrugged. "Let's compare data."

"Let's!" Mesothulas whirled away from the window and crossed the room to seize Prowl's hands. "Tell me, how did all my little instruments work? The thermometer?"

"Exactly like a thermometer should." Prowl popped open his thigh compartments, and Mesothulas let go of his hands to dig around in them himself. Prowl patiently endured it. "No areas with unusual temperatures."

"And my laser velocimeter? How did it handle walls this time?" Mesothulas stuffed the thermometer under his armpit so he could pop open the bottom of the laser velocimeter and check the patchy wiring repair job he'd done after their last job.

"By _not_ assuming they were pockets of insanely dense air."

"Perfect!" He stuffed the thermometer back in Prowl's thigh compartment and smacked it shut. "I'll let _you_ keep that one, you're so meticulous." Translation: he was going to check out the wash rack with the far more fun laser velocimeter while Prowl waved the thermometer at a stack of shammies. "What about this?" He took Prowl's hand again, lifting it to look at the acoustic analyzer. "I've been _most_ eager for you to try out my new toy and tell me how you feel about it. I know what a weak spot you have for equipment that flies around."

Prowl frowned at the accusation. Mesothulas's smiling optics brightened. Prowl's frown wavered. "I enjoyed it."

"Hah!"

Prowl didn't dignify Mesothulas with a reply.

"Well, let me see the data it caught." Mesothulas tapped at the display, reading through several menus upside-down, before pulling up the hologram projection of the den. He cackled. "Is that _you?_" He poked at the rainbow-colored model of Prowl standing in the den.

What was so funny about it? "It's certainly not the wailing ghost."

"Prowl—" He couldn't speak for a fit of giggles that shook his shoulders. "You're supposed to _leave the room_ while they're doing their measurements. Did the countdowns display? There was supposed to be one at the start and the end."

"... Oh." Sheepishly, Prowl mumbled, "I thought they were just to indicate when the marbles were about to start working."

That inspired a fresh round of cackling. "W-well, you know for next time." Mesothulas patted the back of Prowl's hand, then dropped it to start scanning the room with the laser velocimeter. It was a formality more than anything else—there was probably nothing worth finding in here—but it was always worth checking. They had far too many cases where something malfunctioning or broken in one room could cause strange circumstances at the end of the hall. "What about your EMF readings? Anything remarkable?"

Prowl got started in the opposite corner with the thermometer. "Only the desk that unfolds into a recharge slab."

"Ooh, now _that_ sounds handy." Mesothulas sounded far too interested for Prowl's taste.

"Most nights, our berth is _already_ completely covered with your projects. You wouldn't have enough room for them if it shrank into a desk."

"It's not _completely_—"

"Last week I woke up and made optic contact with half a head."

Mesothulas hooted. "Is that why I found it halfway across the room?"

"Yes. Anyway—" he raised his voice over Mesothulas's laughing, "_anyway,_ I'd have to check it again when it's powered on to see exactly what kind of EM radiation it puts out; but I wouldn't be surprised if a slab with an unusual design used in such tight quarters could cause the kind of brain module interference we've seen cause nocturnal hallucinations in the past."

"Possible, but doubtful. He said he's heard the sound coming from the den while in other rooms—meaning he wasn't on his recharge slab at the time."

Prowl turned that over. "Did you verify that he wasn't on the slab when the sounds started? If he started hallucinating and fled the room, the sounds could have continued for a while before his brain module sorted itself out."

"I can find that out. Do you want to hear his answers to your questionnaire?"

"Please."

Mesothulas slid his datapad back out to read through his notes as he continued haphazardly scanning the air. "He only experiences the noise at home, never anywhere else—so, most likely being caused by something in the apartment rather than by his own mind. It's a recent phenomenon—he's been living here seasonally for three to four centuries, and the noise started half a month ago. He last remodeled a century ago and hasn't noticed any recent building maintenance or other work that might account for the usual array of infrastructure changes that could produce new noises; so there's also the possibility that something might have broken down. At least one new neighbor moved in around the time the noises started—and, of course, he didn't dare stop to think it might be a noisy neighbor. No obvious enemies that might be out to terrify him. A couple of recent petty disagreements in Kaon, but I _highly_ doubt they'd have followed him to Iacon just to play a prank..."

"They could have hired someone else. You underestimate the depths of pettiness the Kaonite nobility will stoop to. Did you skip the tub?"

Mesothulas huffed. "The movement of air inside an oversized bath tub is not causing a wailing in Mirage's den."

"Please check anyway. I dislike working with incomplete models."

"I know, I know." Mesothulas leaned over the edge of the tub to wave the laser velocimeter inside it.

While leaning into it, Mesothulas accidentally pressed a button on the tub's rim. He hopped back at the sound of a grumbling engine noise, like a motorized door rolling up; both he and Prowl turned to the window as the balcony extended.

"... What did you do."

"It was an accident!"

They stared at the balcony. They stared at each other. Mesothulas said, "I have an idea."

"Is it 'put the balcony back and pretend nothing happened'?"

"Nooo."

A minute later, they were standing on the balcony, leaning back against the railing, watching as the acoustic analyzer's marbles whizzed around the room.

Mirage knocked on the living room window and made an open-handed _what are you doing?_ gesture.

Mesothulas gave him a thumbs up.

###

Usually, on cases where the primary "supernatural activity" happened at night and its source wasn't immediately evident during the day, Mesothulas and Prowl would set up cameras and other recording equipment to take data for them over a series of nights; but the _first_ night, they always spent on site. It allowed them to observe nighttime conditions personally, and inspired confidence in clients who expected all paranormal investigators to operate like cheap 4-bit novel ghost hunters.

After thoroughly scanning Mirage's apartment, Mesothulas and Prowl relocated to a nearby basement café; where iridescent-painted beastformers skulked along walkways above the customers' heads taking orders. They nursed the cheapest drinks on the menu for a couple of hours, and deeply regretted their café; choice. Prowl studiously analyzed their collected data for anything unusual. Mesothulas struck up a conversation with a passing scorpion, asking if playing the part of an exotic animal at a themed restaurant was as demeaning as it looked and whether the pay made up for it. (Answers: yes; and mostly.) In the evening, they returned to Mirage's place. They assured Mirage that they didn't need anything for the night, not even the recharge slab—they'd be staying awake to observe, and they'd brought their own fuel to help them stay awake—and settled on the den floor for the night with a recorder on the desk.

Prowl sat cross-legged against the wash rack door. Mesothulas lay flat on his back, feet up on the wall, datapad held over his face. Every once in a while, as he got fidgety, Mesothulas lifted his hips, balancing his weight between his shoulder tires and his feet on the walls, and rolled a few inches back and forth. Prowl tried not to watch and usually failed.

"Maybe one of us should have taken the slab tonight. We _do_ need to test it." Prowl leaned forward to look at the recharge slab's socket under the desk again. "It's got the highest probability of being the source of the sound."

Mesothulas's back smacked to the floor again. "The sound also happens at night. If you test the slab at night and _do_ hear the sound, does that mean you proved it came from the slab or that it occurred on the usual schedule while you coincidentally happened to be using the slab?"

Prowl straightened up. "Fair point. We'll test it in the morning."

"And what about the pillars in the wall?"

In Prowl's analysis of the data they'd collected, the acoustic scans of the den had found four "pillars"—or something like pillars—on the wall behind the shelves. They were visible in the rainbow-colored model the acoustic analyzer had produced as dark blue vertical stripes, indicating that they absorbed sounds more readily than the rest of the room. Sounds didn't echo back out of them like they were supposed to.

"They're suspect number two," Prowl said. "Very strange, but less probable than hallucinations triggered by an unusually high EMF produced by a non-standard recharge slab in a very small room."

Mesothulas made a vague noise of acknowledgment, but it was clear Prowl was losing his attention. He leaned forward again, this time trying to see the datapad Mesothulas was reading. Mesothulas tilted it slightly so Prowl could see an artist's rendition of a Titan standing on a world with two suns.

"Reading that again?"

"You'd like this part better, it's more historical now—records of Titans leaving Cybertron, and myths from alien worlds that might indicate a Titan visited them."

"Myths? I thought you said it was historical."

"Well, the 'Titans leaving Cybertron' part is." He tilted the datapad back toward himself and scrolled down. "But now the text has left Cybertron completely, and there's been no mention of Crystal City, or any Titans inside it. Which is _quite_ strange—if there were _any_ rumors of a Titan in its ruins, you would think they'd be featured quite prominently. But when last I spoke with him, Shockwave seemed _utterly convinced_ that there was a surviving Titan in Crystal City, I would so dearly like to hear his sources—"

Disdainfully, Prowl asked, "You mean Scientist Shockwave?" ("Scientist Shockwave" struck them both as a more polite nickname for him than the far more obvious "Empurata Shockwave.")

Mesothulas gave him a sideways glance. "Have I ever spoken to _Senator_ Shockwave? Yes, I mean Scientist Shockwave. I alw— You _always_ ask which Shockwave and it's always Scientist Shockwave."

"I'm just making sure."

"Because you can't stand to hear me call him just 'Shockwave.' You don't think that's his real name."

"Neither do _you_."

Mesothulas tilted his head a couple of times, weighing the accusation. "... I _am_ inclined to agree, but that doesn't mean constantly clarifying isn't a waste of time."

Prowl leaned back against the wall. "When did you talk to him?"

"Oh, I—Don't worry about it."

Prowl gave him a sideways look. Mesothulas waved it off, and repeated, "Don't worry. We crossed paths while shopping."

"'Shopping.'"

"'Shopping,' yes."

Prowl dreaded imagining what, exactly, they'd been shopping for.

It was hands, as it happened. But only ethically sourced hands—_Mesothulas_ had insisted on ethical sourcing, anyway, in deference to Prowl—from accidental deaths or voluntary donations, no murders or back alley thefts and the like. After the vendor had asked whether Mesothulas considered empurata an ethical source—"they _are_ taken legally, technically"—Mesothulas had mused over the question for almost a minute before deciding, no, probably not, since the donor hadn't exactly consented; and the vendor had promptly pointed out the only three pairs of hands on the table that still qualified. Shockwave, who had given himself no such limitations, said he was just browsing and left without getting any.

Every time Prowl and Mesothulas saw Shockwave, he somehow ended up discussing—in a droning voice utterly ill-suited for the outlandishness of his claims—some wild, mysterious _thing_ he was currently working on: harnessing magical powers governed by some distant alien talisman, mixing elixirs that could destroy energy or reverse time, and the like. However, no matter how strange his obsession du jour, he backed up his claims with little glimpses of his work in quantum physics and chemistry that lent solid credence to even his wildest assertions and made one burn with longing to see the rest of his groundbreaking work.

From Mesothulas's perspective, anyway. From Prowl's, he was, at best, a charlatan skilled in stitching together semi-plausible math and discussing it too fast for one to immediately pick up the logical holes in the purported theory underpinning his claims; and at worst, a delusional and dangerous idiot with just enough of a background in chemistry to impress_ some people_ who thought that a thin façade of verisimilitude was as good as scientific proof. And furthermore, Prowl didn't know _what_ Mesothulas saw in Shockwave to be so impressed by his irresponsibly far-fetched declarations. Mesothulas always argued that Shockwave's "declarations" were _not_ far-fetched if you had the proper scientific background to understand his work, which of course Mesothulas _did_ have and Prowl, whose crowning intellectual achievement had been earning a license that allowed him to play with the prosthetic microscopes in the Iacon forensics labs, couldn't possibly have. And Prowl always said he would be overjoyed to obtain the "proper scientific background" to recognize Shockwave's "greatness" if Mesothulas were willing to teach it to him, the way he'd happily taught Prowl everything he'd needed to know to keep up in the paranormal investigative community and to assist with Mesothulas's lab work, but everything Mesothulas _had_ taught Prowl only gave him a loftier mental vantage point from which he could look down at Shockwave's "work" and see just how ludicrous it was; and then Mesothulas said well it _wouldn't_ be ludicrous if they could see the rest of his work rather than the mere snippets he'd deigned to show them; and Prowl said that was tantamount to admitting it _was_ ludicrous because there _wasn't_ a "rest of his work" as far as either of them actually knew, and Mesothulas was ridiculous for taking him at his word that there _was_ just because he _wanted_ to believe that some wandering, disgraced criminal chemist knew how to do magic and raise the dead—

They didn't talk about Shockwave very often.

They simultaneously and independently decided to change topics. Prowl said, "That café; seemed... uncomfortable. Did it seem uncomfortable to you?"

"If by 'uncomfortable' you mean 'exploitative and exoticizing toward beastformers'—"

"I did."

"—then yes. _Very_ uncomfortable."

"Good. I mean—" at Mesothulas's sideways look, Prowl scrambled to backtrack, "not _good_, but—I'm glad I picked up on that accurately. I don't know that I would have a few cycles ago."

"Mmmno, probably not."

Mesothulas was teasing Prowl. Prowl elected to ignore it, because he was right. "I'm sorry we went there."

Mesothulas shrugged, which made one of his shoulder tires roll along the ground. "We didn't know. And I _did_ get to talk to that scorpion, so it wasn't a total loss."

"What's that like for you?" Prowl asked. "Crossing paths with beastformers."

Mesothulas dropped his datapad to his chest and looked up at the ceiling, considering the question. "It's... strange," he said. "It's like there—"

An unearthly bellowing filled the den. They bolted upright. Objects rattled on the shelves. Prowl tried to tug Mesothulas over to protect him, Mesothulas tried to open the door to the kitchen, they tumbled onto the door, and when it open they fell sprawling on the kitchen floor.

Mirage looked down at them from his bar stool as he sipped his drink. "Not what you expected?" He was barely audible over the howl.

"A bit louder," Prowl admitted. He felt Mesothulas trembling with laughter under him, and scooted sideways to let him up.

"I can see why you find it difficult to entertain," Mesothulas said, climbing to his feet and exaggeratedly brushing himself off. "That's a _great_ deal of energy. I've never heard such a noisy ghost before."

"Never?" Mirage gave him a crestfallen look. "Then, you can't deal with—?"

"Oh, of _course_ we can deal with it. It's only _loud,_ not wholly _unique_. We'll know more once we've analyzed the recording. Right, Prowl?"

Prowl didn't reply. He'd sat upright but hadn't stood, palms flat over his audials, looking into the room and frowning.

Mesothulas tapped his shoulder to get his attention, and said loudly, "The recording, Prowl?"

"Hm?" It took him a second to process the question. "Did you reset the recorder's volume sensitivity from EVP levels to normal?"

Mesothulas paused. They left their recorder on maximum sensitivity for months at a time, to catch potential whispers from ghosts—_hah_—no, it was usually to catch and analyze minute mechanical sounds. They typically had no reason to adjust the sensitivity. "Nnno."

"Ah. Well. We've probably recorded extremely loud static, then." Prowl turned back to staring into the den.

"Oh." Mesothulas glanced sheepishly at Mirage, who wasn't looking impressed.

"Are these sorts of errors usual?" Mirage asked.

"It can commonly take several nights to acquire adequate data about a ghost to make an assessment," Mesothulas said. "And this one was _far_ louder than we were anticipating—"

"I told you it was a wailing!"

"This— I wouldn't call it a _wailing,_ precisely—"

"Is wailing quiet where you come from?"

"I—no, but—"

Prowl interrupted, "Does that sound like words to you?"

They both fell silent, listening hard. Mesothulas copied Prowl, pressing his hands over his helm. With the sound slightly dampened, some of the reverb and clattering of shaking objects was cut out; and though the bellowing remained unintelligible, it was possible to tell it could be divided into syllables.

It went on another few minutes, during which they all silently strained to listen for anything decipherable in the noise; and then it abruptly fell silent. Prowl and Mesothulas looked at each other, speechless.

Mirage asked, "Still think it's the wind?"

###

"Have you checked with the neighbors? To see if they've heard it?" Mesothulas asked.

"Primus, no—imagine my embarrassment, asking the neighbors if they'd heard a _ghost_ lately," Mirage said. "And they wouldn't have, would they? If it's only haunting my apartment?"

The sound had lasted, according to their recorder, from 1:05 a.m. to 1:19 a.m. It was just past 1:30 now, and Prowl was set up in the kitchen, analyzing the recording—which _was_ mostly static—straining to hear anything intelligible. The recorder was directly plugged into his audials, using the same ports where he usually plugged in his comm unit, so no one else would have to hear and so Prowl wouldn't have to account for the distortion of headphone speakers when listening to the playback; but Mesothulas could still tell when he was playing it and when he wasn't, based on when his focused grimace changed to a pained grimace.

"Of course, all bets are off with supernatural phenomena. If the sound itself is as supernatural as its origin—a psychic phenomenon, say—it's quite possible the neighbors hear nothing," Mesothulas said. "But if the sound _itself_ is wholly natural despite its supernatural origin, it should travel the same way as normal sounds. So knowing whether the neighbors hear it could help us figure out... hhhow it's transmitting its sounds."

"Hmm." Mirage grimaced. "I could ask, but..."

"Or we could ask," Mesothulas said quickly. "We wouldn't mention on whose behalf we're asking. We can let them believe building management is sending us around to ask about unusual noises."

Mirage looked relieved. "That sounds fine. I don't know that you'll find out much from them, though. At night, they probably won't hear the sounds through their wash racks."

"It's definitely a voice," Prowl cut in, unplugging one of his audials from the recorder. "Not Neocybex. _Possibly_ some variety of Primal Vernacular."

Mirage's optics widened. "So we're dealing with something that died millions of years ago?"

"Sure," Prowl said unconvincingly.

Mesothulas pointed at Prowl. "I want to hear that in a minute." Then pointed at Mirage. "What do you mean, 'through their wash racks'? Wouldn't the adjoining walls on the neighboring units be their dens, too? Most apartments we've been in, neighboring units are mirror images of each other. Is that not the case here?"

"Oh, it's the same here," Mirage said quickly, "but my den wasn't always a den. I mentioned the renovations I undertook about a century ago? My current wash rack used to be the recharge room, and the den used to be the original wash rack. I thought I'd get a lot more use out of a social wash rack than a large recharge room."

Mesothulas stared at Mirage. "_That_—" he pointed toward the den, "used to be the _wash rack?_"

"Quite an upgrade, isn't it?"

Prowl asked, "Are the original pipes still in the wall?"

Mirage turned to give him a disgruntled look, and Mesothulas quickly said, "Some ghosts are attracted to flowing water. _Are_ the pipes there?"

###

"'Some ghosts are attracted to flowing water,'" Prowl muttered under his breath, while Mesothulas fought back the urge to titter. "How much rubbish do you feed our clients when I'm not listening?"

"Does it matter?" Mesothulas murmured, drawing closer to Prowl as they walked down the hall. "If it lets them think I'm here to validate their paranormal beliefs long enough for us to find sufficient proof against a haunting, then in the end they find out the truth."

"And leave with a half dozen more false beliefs," Prowl said. "You don't have to give them _more_ delusions."

"You _know_ that if I didn't play along, they'd kick us out. How far do you think we'd have gotten if you'd kept asking him about wind between buildings?"

"Fair," Prowl said grudgingly. "But there's a difference between 'playing along with extant delusions' and 'contributing to new delusions.'"

Mesothulas shrugged. "Also fair. We'll work out new rules after this case, hmm?"

"Hm." Prowl shrugged back. "Here's the door."

Finding out there were pipes in the walls had opened up a whole new branch of possibilities. "Weird pipe sounds" were among the top five sources of so-called "haunting" they dealt with. Usually, though, the mysterious sounds produced by pipes were closer to banging, vibrating, or flowing water. Never anything that sounded like a person—but, in other contexts, voices _could_ be carried through pipes. It was possible...

So here they were, one floor above Mirage's apartment. Prowl had found out from the door mech that this was indeed the floor where a new neighbor had moved a few weeks ago. Now, just long enough past dawn that most people would be awake, Prowl knocked on the door exactly above Mirage's.

There was a thud, and a dragging sound, a guttural growl that made Mesothulas step back; and then the door was opened by a tall, hostile-looking, horned mech. Hanging on the wall behind him was a mass of bladed weapons and a crumpled tinfoil rectangle embossed to read _I survived the Ark-1 and all I got was this lousy plaque._ "Yes? Sorry." He rubbed his optics. "Late night. Yes?"

"Sorry to disturb you, sir," said Mesothulas, from near the opposite wall. "We're trying to find a, er— Did you move in recently, by any chance?"

"A few weeks ago. Why?"

Prowl asked, "What were you doing last night between the hours of midnight and two a.m.?"

The horned mech gave Prowl a sullen look. "Am I under arrest?"

"No no!" Mesothulas tugged Prowl back by a door. "One of the neighbors reported a noise disturbance; we're just trying to find the source of it."

The horned mech glanced between them skeptically, but nodded slightly. "Very well."

Prowl asked, "Did you use your wash rack last night betw—" At Mesothulas's warning squeeze, he switched to, "sometime after midnight?"

The horned mech hesitated, then nodded. "I always shower when I get home."

"And," Mesothulas asked, "you always get home at midnight or later?"

Another hesitant nod.

"Do you sing in the shower?" Prowl asked.

The horned mech frowned. "Yyyes."

Mesothulas asked, "In Primal Vernacular?"

His frown deepened.

Prowl and Mesothulas both smiled.

###

"May I present," Mesothulas said, with a flourish, "your 'ghost.' Cyclonus of Upper Tetrahex." Cyclonus stood in Mirage's doorway, clearly uncomfortable and possibly not quite fully awake yet.

"Oh. I—goodness." With wide optics, Mirage looked him up and down, taking in his ancient armor, the bare struts of his face and hands, the horns and sunken optics. "I wasn't... wasn't expecting him to be quite so corporeal. Hello, I— Do you speak Neocybex? Or did you die before the language was invented?"

Mesothulas made a choking noise. Cyclonus gave him a baleful look.

Prowl stepped forward. "I think I ought to explain this one."

###

"I can't thank you two enough for clearing this up," Mirage said, shaking Mesothulas's and Prowl's hands in turn. "Too bad about how it turned out, though. I can hardly ask the poor mech not to sing in his own shower. I suppose I can move my recharge slab to the living room. Maybe he'll be willing to shower in the mornings on nights I'm entertaining?"

"Perhaps you could invite him to the party," Mesothulas said. "Then he won't be going home to shower until you're done entertaining."

Mirage scoffed. "I don't think he looks the partying type, do you?"

"Oh, you can never judge by appearances," Mesothulas said. "We know he keeps late nights and likes to sing, don't we?"

Mirage gave him a dubious look.

Prowl said, "Actually, regarding your noise problem, we may be able to help each other out."

"Oh!" Mesothulas clasped his hands together. "Yes, of course! Mirage, we've never seen plumbing that carries clear Cybertronian voices between floors before. We would _love_ to study the unique acoustic properties of your apartment. It could help advance the field of architectural acoustics, give us a better idea of what to look for if we get calls about hauntings like this one in the future, _and_ might let us figure out a way to dampen the noise for you without tearing up two floors of plumbing."

"Huh." Mirage looked between the two of them. "I admit, I _did_ call you two because when I was looking for paranormal investigators, I kept stumbling on research you two had published. I thought it made you look credible, but—if you studied my apartment, would you be—? To be clear, I don't want any attention or notoriety because of this incident."

"We always change names and identifying information in our papers," Mesothulas assured him.

"Once we've figured out what makes your pipes so conducive to carrying sound, we'll be able to generate new example structures that experimenters can construct to replicate our findings," Prowl said. "Not even your plumbing will be identifiable from our paper."

Mirage smiled. "In that case, I'll be happy to help."

"Splendid!" Mesothulas grabbed his hand to shake again. "We'll comm you in a few days once we've done our preliminary research and assembled whatever equipment we need to do a thorough job."

"I look forward to it." Mirage squeezed Mesothulas's hand. "And if there's anything else I can do to repay you, do let me know. I owe you a favor."

Mesothulas's gaze drifted toward the wash rack door. "No," Prowl said.

"Tell you what," Mirage said. "If you ever want a spa treatment worthy of a senator, call me up. One time special offer."

Mesothulas looked at Prowl with wide, sparkling optics. Prowl rolled his optics, but said, "We'll save the offer for a special occasion. Thank you."

Mesothulas only barely restrained the urge to hug him in front of Mirage.

He made up for it by grabbing Prowl's hands and spinning him around the room as soon as they got home.

###

Home was a long, narrow two-story loft that had been part of a factory some time back when Nova was in charge, back when Iacon exported goods instead of professionals. It had a mezzanine that ran the length of the loft and was half the width of the first floor, several skylights, a large window on the mezzanine level that took up most of the end of the loft opposite the door, and no walls separating the space into rooms. Even the wash rack was part of the open space, a corner of the first floor with a stand-alone shower head and a drain of dubious reliability that they'd separated from the rest of the floor space with a low cement barrier that Prowl constantly tripped over when he was tired. The first floor was lit by a row of round lamps hanging from the mezzanine that reminded Prowl of some interrogation rooms he'd seen.

The apartments in this old factory were probably the cheapest per square foot this close to downtown, and they still wouldn't have been able to afford the place if not for both the entirety of the regular stipend Prowl received for remaining on call as an enforcer in case a state of emergency was declared, and the fact that Mesothulas had negotiated a decrease in their rent in return for serving as electrician for the whole building. Sometimes Prowl caught Mesothulas messing with the fuse box when nobody had had any power problems lately so he could fix the problem and convince the landlord he was earning his keep. Prowl always scolded him but never quite told him to stop.

They kept their recharge slab on the mezzanine under the window, their fuel rations on the opposite end of the mezzanine, and a couple of ancient couches in between where Prowl could read and Mesothulas could flop down to refuel and pester him. The first floor space under the mezzanine was partially taken up by thirteen cheap, thin bookcases, pressed together, with wheels on the bottom so they could pull them out as needed. They'd only filled half with datapads so far, but eagerly looked forward to filling up the rest. Prowl meticulously stuck pink sticky notes on every single datapad he hadn't read yet, and Mesothulas stuck green notes on either the datapads he'd already read or the datapads he wanted to read—he could never keep it consistent—so the green notes ultimately ended up being useless. The rest of the first floor was taken up by half a dozen mismatched tables: Mesothulas's workspace. They were covered by his copious in-progress projects, including the literal guts of his next masterpiece—as was most of the floor space on both floors.

The loft was hard to light, hard to heat, prone to drafts, and in a building filled with engineers and cars in upper-class service jobs that looked askance at a couple of alt-mode exempt bots eking out a living chasing ghosts, and it was the best place they could have ever asked for.

Upon returning home—and after being spun—Prowl confiscated all the equipment Mesothulas was carrying at the door. They had long ago agreed that immediate confiscation was the only way to guarantee they didn't end up scrambling around the loft, looking for an infrared camera fifteen minutes before they were supposed to meet with a client. Mesothulas went to get on one of the four still-functional computers he'd assembled and left scattered around his workspace to begin teaching himself everything there was to know about acoustics; Prowl stored their equipment in one of the lockers by the door, and took a ladder upstairs with a datapad to read.

A half hour into reading, Prowl leaned over the railing. "Mesothulas?"

"Hmm?" Mesothulas didn't move, sitting cross-legged on a table with his elbow planted in front of his legs and his chin in his hands as he read from his computer.

"Did you take your case notes in the Titan datapad?"

"It was the only datapad I had on hand!" Mesothulas looked up from his research. "Are you reading it? I thought you thought it was all urban legends and mythology."

"You asked me to read it."

Mesothulas smiled behind his mask. He slid off the table, climbed the ladder, and stopped where he could cross his arms on the mezzanine floor and look up at Prowl. "Oh Prowl, you know I haven't quite finished reading it yet?"

"Oh?" He tabbed over to the table of contents. "You were close. Alien Titan sightings was one of the last chapters."

"But I'm not _done_," Mesothulas emphasized. "It's my datapad; I don't want you to finish it before me."

Prowl lowered the datapad just enough to look over it at Mesothulas. "I'm reading now. I'm not going to give it back."

"I suppose we'll have to read it together, then, won't we?" Mesothulas climbed the last few rungs, practically oozed across the floor to slink onto the couch, and pushed Prowl's waist until he obligingly lay down. He ran his fingers along the ridges of Prowl's codpiece, and cooed, "Open up for me."

With their cables twisted together and plugged into each other, each mentally reached for the other's mind, exchanging sensory data they otherwise couldn't access. Mesothulas saw himself in numbers, the angles and lengths that made up the planes of his armor, freckled in percent signs and degree symbols and decimal points; Prowl could smell his own wax finish and the faint, distinctive scent of overheated computer that always lingered around his head no matter how much he used his processor fans, both scents turned subtle and sweet and comforting when filtered through Mesothulas's senses. Mesothulas slid down to lay between Prowl's legs, turned his optics off, and rested his head on Prowl's abdomen; and Prowl read for them both.


	2. Case 2, Part 1: Sentinel Prime and the God of Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is 90% flashback and also _probably_ going to be the shortest chapter; but that's because if I did the flashback and case 2 all in one go, they'd be the _longest_ chapter by a long shot. But it sets up for the case, and so next week we'll be launching straight into the action.
> 
> In the mean time, enjoy this week's enemies-to-unrequited-lovers speedrun.

Prowl's optics widened, his back went rigid, and his jaw would have dropped if it hadn't immediately clenched in anger.

No. Absolutely not.

What was the ghost hunter doing at this conference.

When Prowl had persuaded Sentinel Prime to allow him to attend this conference, he'd been expecting to find himself among his intellectual _betters_. It was a conference on bioelectromagnetics—the way EM systems and fields interacted in a mech's body and with surrounding EM systems. Nearly everyone there was a doctor, or else otherwise involved in the medical field; the remainder were scientists, engineers, and researchers. Prowl would have been surprised if anyone there had less than two thousand years of formal education, besides himself.

Himself, and _that idiot_ over there, talking to _Rossum,_ of all people. Why was _he_ talking to Rossum? _Prowl_ wanted to talk to Rossum. Surely the ghost hunter didn't think he was going to drum up business at a conference full of _doctors_? Maybe he thought he could get his hands on something that would let him fake a floating spark signal—trick his naïve customers into thinking he was showing them a ghost. Ugh. Who let a charlatan like him in?

Prowl grimaced and turned away. Didn't matter. Prowl was there on duty: to research equipment that could help with forensic investigation, and possibly network with researchers and inventors in the hopes of persuading them to turn some of their work in that direction. There was a panel he could see in six minutes that he had just now immediately decided was more important than talking to Rossum, whom Prowl could speak with later.

He turned away from the ghost hunter and headed toward the panel rooms, fuming.

###

There was a booth displaying a prototype spark scanner—a new technology that, if it worked, would eliminate the need for doctors either to physically open up a patient's spark casing to get an accurate scan without a variety of metals in the way, or to try to deduce their spark's state from its effects on their EM field. When it worked, this scanner would be able to see straight past all the metals of the body as if they didn't exist and directly detect the energy inside.

When it worked. Right now, it very successfully ignored metal, as the engineer manning the booth was happy to demonstrate to anyone who came by; but it wasn't very good yet at actually making sense of the energy it detected, which it displayed as an undifferentiated blob, whether it came from a spark or not. The engineer, who would freely and cheerfully explain to anyone who asked that he'd gotten this far on the prototype by cooperating with a doctor and that both of them were stumped at this point, had set up a touch board with the blueprints and the words "Crowdsourced Brainstorming :)" scrawled at the top.

Mesothulas, who had driven out to Kaon at about three in the morning so that he could be there the moment the conference started without paying for an extra night in the hotel, had stumbled into the display hall the first morning of the conference in a haze of sleep-deprived excitement, checked out the prototype, and scribbled rough notes on a way to recalibrate how the prototype handled scans in order to pick out spark energy from the rest more easily. They were very rudimentary notes—he'd wanted to move on to other displays, and hadn't had enough spare attention to spend on working out all the math and little details behind his proposed process. He'd left it to somebody else to work out the math.

That evening, he'd come by to see that somebody _had,_ in an interminable wall of little blocky numbers that took Mesothulas five fascinated minutes to read and another fifteen minutes to fully make sense of—and once he did, it was clear that the math proved his process was unviable. Somebody had to have spent hours at this board, patiently working out the theory behind Mesothulas's work, probably devising and running a rudimentary simulation to see whether it worked, and demonstrating the results thoroughly enough for him to see the flaws. It was a bit galling to be disproven—but he had to admit, he was impressed by how _thoroughly_ it had been done. This work had to be—what—done by somebody with a thorough understanding of sparks and their circulatory system, but also someone with a good deal of engineering experience, and an understanding of radioactivity, and... goodness, several other fields besides. Mesothulas, certainly, was one such renaissance mech with a similarly wide variety of knowledge bases—but for another one to be at the conference was _remarkable_. Sure, such fields weren't surprising to find at a conference on bioelectromagnetics, but combined in one mech? Perhaps it had been a collaborative effort…

Mesothulas modified his initial proposal to account for the errors the mysterious contributor(s) had pointed out, and made plans to come back the next day.

Late the next morning, he circled by the booth again to check on the other additions and see whether his mysterious correspondent had run the math on his modifications.

But instead, what he saw as he approached the booth was that stupid unpainted army-builder cop from Iacon, squinting at the notes on the board like he was trying to make sense of them. Mesothulas laughed in disbelief. "What are _you_ doing?"

The cop turned toward Mesothulas—and then his optics widened. Evidently, he recognized him too.

"I _thought_ I saw you yesterday," Mesothulas said dismissively. "What are you doing, trying to understand the displays? Shouldn't you be by the doors, checking security or something?" He tried to brush past the cop to reach the touch board—it was like trying to brush past a statue. Mesothulas huffed in frustration.

"I'm not security," the cop said flatly. "I'm here as one of the conference attendees."

Mesothulas looked at him in naked surprise. "_Are_ you?" And then quickly covered his shock. "And what, pray tell, are your qualifications to attend a conference like this, hmm?" Mesothulas's gaze skimmed over him, searching for the attendee badge that would be magnetized to his armor somewhere obvious—it would have a little screen with his function and any relevant professional or educational experience listed.

"I was sent by Sentinel Prime," the cop said, voice still flat and unfriendly. "I'm here to see whether any of the work here could be useful to forensic investigation."

"Oh, Sentinel _Prime_! That's a _very_ big name to throw around. You must be _so_ proud." Mesothulas scoffed. "But I didn't ask who _sent_ you. I asked what your _qualifications_ are. Where did you study, hm? What—what field of expertise do you have that's relevant to this conference?"

The rigid line of the cop's mouth turned down at the corners. Mesothulas finally spotted his badge, stuck to one shoulder over his police decals. Nothing was listed beyond his name and function. Ah, that was right—Prowl. Of _Petrex_. Mesothulas's optics curved in a sardonic smile. "Ah. I see."

"What are _your_ qualifications?" Prowl retorted. Mesothulas was beginning to get the impression that his "flat voice" simply _was_ his voice. "What does a ghost-peddling con artist have to offer accredited doctors?"

Mesothulas's small engine revved angrily. _Con artist_? Was _that_ what Prowl thought he was? "More than an overpromoted traffic cop!" he snapped, raising an arm to show where he'd stuck his badge to his wrist. Name, Mesothulas of Uraya, and function, Exempt (Intellectual Class), followed by every relevant job he'd had, from his last lab position in theoretical subdimensional physics all the way back to his very first job polishing test tubes—he watched in cold amusement as Prowl's optics widened and brightened more the farther Mesothulas scrolled down on the badge—and every degree and certification he'd racked up, from the Iaconian Academy of Science and Technology to the Protihex Medical Mechanics University. At least Prowl wasn't too dull to recognize how impressive the list was, though he probably only recognized its size. "Now, if you would be so kind as to gape in uncomprehending stupidity at _somebody else's_ display, I am _trying_ to reach that touch board."

Prowl quickly snapped out of his awe. "No," he said. "Wait your turn. I'm not done correcting the math."

At the first word, Mesothulas was already puffing himself up, ready to complain about the _absurdity_, the _audacity_, the _absolutely unwarranted hostility_—but only managed to get out "Of _all_ the—" before he processed Prowl's last word. "Sorry. What?"

"Correcting," Prowl said slowly, "the," Prowl added, "math."

Mesothulas stared at him. "You are not."

Prowl gave Mesothulas a look that was as flat as his voice. Then he pointedly turned back to the touch board and began writing, neatly and quickly, picking up where a line left off, in the same little blocky handwriting that Mesothulas had seen yesterday. No. Impossible.

"Let me see!" Mesothulas tried to shove Prowl out of the way, failed, and leaned over to see around him instead. Prowl wasn't writing a reply to Mesothulas's work, but Mesothulas could see the original query he was answering—and flawlessly, too. "Who—whose work are you writing down?"

"My own."

"You are absolutely not." Before Prowl could disagree, Mesothulas leaned over the table next to the touch board, where the engineer behind the project was sitting slouched back in his seat, hands laced over his abdomen, placidly waiting to be approached. "You! You've been here the whole time yesterday and today, haven't you?"

"Sure have," the engineer answered cheerily.

Mesothulas pointed at Prowl. "_He_ didn't work out the math on everyone else's brainstorming, did he?"

"Sure did," the engineer said. Mesothulas gaped behind his mask. "In fact, I invited him over. There are some forged calculators I don't trust with that kind of complex math as much as I trust him."

"You _know_ him?!"

"Sure do." The engineer unslouched, leaned forward, and crossed his arms on his table. "Hey, Prowl."

Prowl's writing paused. "Hi Wheeljack." He continued stamping out digits. It was like watching a typewriter.

Mesothulas looked between them, and then focused on Wheeljack. "How do you know _him?_"

"Oh, I do lots of work with Security Services," he said. "Mostly armor repairs and equipment repairs, but it pays well."

"But you..." Mesothulas gestured weakly at Prowl, "you _called_ him over...?"

"Listen," Wheeljack said, voice low. "Between you and me, Prowl might just be the smartest bot at this show—and I say that as the guy that came here with Ratchet. Definitely in the top five. He might not have a mountain of degrees and credentials like the alt-mode exempt bots here that make a hobby out of collecting them," he reached across the table to nudge his knuckle against the wrist Mesothulas had stuck his badge to, "but give him a couple of textbooks and a specialist to interrogate and he can keep up with anyone here." Wheeljack raised his voice. "You're as brilliant as you are boring, Prowl, isn't that right?"

"Yes," Prowl said distractedly.

"So yeah. He asked me for a couple of constants and formulae he didn't already know, but all that work is his."

"Even on _my_ part?”

Wheeljack leaned over the table, peering at the touch board. "I think he's working on your part right now."

"What?!" Mesothulas rushed back over to the board, straining to see around Prowl. His own second note had been pushed offscreen, and the entire board was filled with Prowl's tiny blocky handwriting. "Let me see!"

"I'm not finished."

"You're responding to _my_ notes! I demand to know what you're saying!"

Prowl hesitated. "You wrote this?"

"Move!" This time, when Mesothulas tried to shove past, Prowl stepped back for him. Mesothulas scrolled rapidly through Prowl's writing. Not only had he, again, worked out all the math behind Mesothulas's proposed fix to the spark scanner—but he’d also showed a couple places where the indicated numbers wouldn't work out, _and_ included very rough notes on what sort of numbers would be needed there for a viable solution. It was bafflingly abstract—like Prowl knew in a theoretical sense what the _math_ needed to look like to get the scanner to work, but had no idea what sort of materials, equipment, settings, or programming were needed out in the physical world in order to produce that math. It was like filling in a color-by-numbers picture by going pixel by pixel and modifying their RGB hex code from the default #FFFFFF to their required hues, #7FFF00 or #8B008B or #DC143C, without understanding what hues any of those codes would produce or even what a color _was_.

Which meant Prowl only actually comprehended about ten percent of what Mesothulas had written, and was running mathematical circles around him _anyway_. He had to go over Prowl's work a couple of times just to make sense of it all.

"If you'd be so kind as to take a short break from gaping in uncomprehending stupidity at my work," Prowl said dryly, "I wasn't quite finished."

Speechless, Mesothulas stepped back. Prowl swept imperiously past him, scrolled down to give himself half a blank page to work with, and quickly got to work filling it. Mesothulas tried to keep up, but was quickly lost.

”Ex—exactly how long did it take you to work all that out?" Surely he'd read Mesothulas's notes last night and thought about it overnight before returning to add his completed solution the next morning?

The stylus paused. "It depends on if you count all the times you and Wheeljack interrupted my train of thought while I was running calculations."

"You're calculating _as you go_?" Mesothulas went a little weak in the knees.

The stylus paused again. "Do you mind?"

Mesothulas shut his mouth with a click. Prowl finished off with a couple of sentences, jabbing an unnecessarily hard period to conclude them, and rounded on Mesothulas. "This is your work?" He rapped the board with the back of his hand, making Mesothulas start.

Mesothulas was about to explain that no, clearly that was all _Prowl's_ work, when he realized that Prowl must have been referring not to the math currently displayed, but to the note it was replying to. "Yes. _Obviously_."

"Obviously," Prowl repeated, and somehow his already-flat voice sounded even more unimpressed. He crossed his arms, tapping the stylus against his elbow. "Why are you wasting everyone’s time on it? Despite your—_copious_ prior qualifications," (and for a moment Mesothulas got the distinct impression that Prowl was trying very hard not to sound like he was complimenting him), "considering your current line of work, you're obviously _not_ here to help the participants advance the scientific and medical applications of bioelectromagnetics. So what is it? I can't imagine that helping a spark scanner work _better_ would help you better use it to, say, convince some target that there's a disembodied spark floating around his quarters."

Mesothulas’s awe evaporated. ”Ohhho, is _that_ what you think I do!" Mesothulas stepped back, hands planted on his hips. "Well! I'll have you know that, unlike most representatives of _your_ current line of work, _I_ am not interested in _pushing a narrative_ designed to make it sound like I'm the only bastion of defense between the populace and some vague, shadowy threat!" Prowl visibly bristled, and Mesothulas realized with a plummet of his fuel tank that he'd probably just signed his own arrest warrant. Under the circumstances, he very rationally decided, the only prudent thing he could do was double down and talk faster. "I'm not interested in _deluding_ people into thinking they're haunted, Monotone. They come to me when they _already think they're haunted_. And I collect the evidence to show them what's _actually_ going on—knocking pipes, inanimate objects with unusually spark-like EM fields, _whatever_—and _show_ it to them so that they know what's actually going on! Call me a—a paranormal _debunker_, if you will; that's what most of my jobs end up being! Nobody hires you if you put _that_ down on your card, though."

Prowl opened his mouth, hesitated, and then asked, "What about the job you did for Flatfoot? Consulting on the so-called 'Spindleback' sightings."

"I told him _it doesn't exist_."

Prowl opened his mouth again, froze, shut it, opened it again, and finally said, "Ah."

"Which I'm quite sure you would have _known_ if you had _asked him_ about the case instead of, I presume, complaining to everyone in audial range about the _big bad paranormal investigator._"

Prowl didn't even open his mouth. He just looked down, frowning. Which was just fine; it gave Mesothulas time to prepare his next retort.

Finally, Prowl said, "You're right. I'm sorry."

"Hmph! If you and your ilk weren't so close-m— Come again?"

"I apologized," Prowl said. "I misjudged you based on my assumption of what you do. Your work seems..." Again he seemed to be stumbling over avoiding a compliment he didn't want to hand out. He settled for, "more responsibly grounded in science than I'd anticipated."

Mesothulas regarded Prowl skeptically. "Really."

"Really. In fact, I think scientifically dispelling rumors and superstitions is a—an admirable line of work."

Very unexpectedly, Mesothulas felt something squirm in his fuel tank. For an alarming moment, he thought one of his sealed subspace pockets had ruptured and was spilling kibble inside his chassis. But no, he realized quickly, he was feeling—what was that—flattered? No. Yes?

"But," Prowl turned back to the touch board, "if your goal is to scan the environment and prove a wandering spark isn't there, making a scanner that can _only_ detect spark energy—which would show nothing in the absence of a ghost—is less useful than a scanner that can detect _any_ kind of EMF, properly identify the shape and source of it, and allow you to conclusively prove the energy field your customer is detecting came from a—a—a light bulb or whatever." He scrolled back up and wiped several lines off the board. Mesothulas almost squeaked in distress before realizing that Prowl had probably done that work in fifteen seconds and could redo it just as fast. "So, instead of narrowing the parameters to only detect the energy put out by sparks, it should be broadened to take in even more of the electromagnetic spectrum." He fell silent while he rewrote his calculations, and stepped back to let Mesothulas examine them.

"That's—That… _is_ a far more useful way to do it, actually." Mesothulas skimmed over Prowl's new work.

Prowl added, "Plus, it would have a greater variety of uses in forensic investigation. Which is what interests _me_, at least."

Wheeljack was leaning so far forward to try to see the touch board that he was practically laying on his table. "You two do know that this thing is supposed to be used for _detecting spark anomalies_ for _medical purposes_, right?"

"Haven't you heard of the curb cutter effect?"

"This isn't an example of the curb cutter effect, Prowl."

Prowl shrugged.

"It _would_ work," Mesothulas said slowly, "but the benefit of this thing is that it's handheld." He pointed at the prototype on the table beside Wheeljack. "To function the way you've outlined here, it would need to be about ten times bigger."

Prowl looked from his math to the prototype and back. "Would it?"

"Do you have—are you the slightest bit capable of visualizing what it is you've actually described here?"

"Abstractly," Prowl said. Mesothulas gave him a strange look, and he shrugged again. "My speciality is math. I don't know what equipment is necessary to make that math a physical reality."

"Well—the kind of components needed to do these kinds of sensitive scans don't come small enough for a handheld scanner." Mesothulas glanced at Wheeljack for confirmation—Mesothulas hadn't been deeply embedded in the scientific _or_ engineering communities for quite some time now—and Wheeljack nodded in agreement.

“Can the components be made small enough?" Prowl asked, adjusting the touch screen to see the original blueprints.

Mesothulas reached over Prowl's arm to draw circles around the parts that would need to be replaced with smaller versions of more sensitive components. "Oh, it would probably just need somebody adequately clever to look over the designs for the existent components and figure out how to shrink them." He hesitated, glanced sideways at Prowl, and—not quite sure what he was doing—blurted out, "I doubt it would take very long, if a couple of brilliant bots sat down to figure it out together."

"Hm. Good." Prowl was still looking at the blueprints.

He hadn't taken the bait. (Mesothulas wasn't even wholly sure what it was he was trying to bait Prowl into. Surely he wasn't shooting for—) "Buy you a drink if you do my math?"

He regretted the question immediately.

He could hear Prowl's air compressor shudder to a stop as his vents froze. His head whipped around to give Mesothulas a wide-opticked, panicked look. He turned the look on Wheeljack—who had diplomatically slid back into his seat to give them their privacy and was refusing to make optic contact—and then back on Mesothulas. He croaked, "What?"

Mesothulas cringed. Oh, poor choice of words. "I just m— It should take us an hour at most, I suspect—and the hotel has a bar. And I _could_ use help with the math. But, if you d—if you would rather not miss any of the conference, we could exchange contact information—" no, that could be taken wrong as well, "—or, or work it out on the board, when we pass by it..."

The panic in Prowl's optics was receding, but Mesothulas still glimpsed wariness in his gaze before he looked away again. He wasn't terribly fond of optic contact, Mesothulas was realizing. After a moment of contemplation, Prowl said, slowly, "It would be for the betterment of multiple fields, if we could get this working." He pulled out a small camera, zoomed out the touch screen, and began taking pictures of the blueprints and of the various notes that had been left, muttering to himself, "This _is_ a conference. We _are_ supposed to be networking."

"Right," Mesothulas said dully.

"But I'm perfectly capable of buying my own drink."

"Got it." Mesothulas wasn't sure what he'd been expecting—he really, _really_ wasn't sure—but he had the feeling he'd just ruined his chances of getting it.

###

An hour and two drinks apiece later, they'd gotten eighty percent of the way to figuring out how to shrink those components. They were now huddled shoulder-to-shoulder over one datapad at the hotel bar while Mesothulas scribbled and Prowl attempted to hold another datapad with a news article in front of his face.

"No no," Prowl said, "listen listen, listen—the bots I work with don't even have a use for this thing yet, when I told them last week what I'd read about this discovery, they were all, oh, there will never be a practical application for this kind of thing in forensics, but it would be _perfect_ for telling scraplet droppings apart from your so-called 'rust phantom' silica—"

"I know, I know, shh shh—" Mesothulas tried to shove the datapad out of his face with one hand while scribbling a new set of blueprints, which was difficult, considering that he was trying to do both with the same hand. "I didn't even _think_ of that when I read the article, but you're _absolutely_ right—" 

"—all you'd need to do is modify the technology to—"

Mesothulas mushed a finger over Prowl's mouth, "—I'm _working_ on the blueprints—"

Talking around the finger, Prowl went on, "—and then you could—" He abruptly fell silent as he became conscious of the fact that he was being touched, on the face. Which hadn't happened since... Well. Well, quite a while.

Stunned, he held very still, listening to Mesothulas mutter about miniaturizing silica filters, before he realized Mesothulas might be able to feel that his face was heating up. He jerked back from Mesothulas's touch, and ordered a third drink.

Just as it was arriving, Mesothulas announced, "Done!" and held up the datapad, showing off his hastily scrawled plans. "Well? Does it meet your specifications?"

Prowl blinked a couple of times to help him focus and took the datapad. Once he had it, Mesothulas picked up his drink, tried to pour it into his wrist funnel, and studied the glass in confusion when nothing came out of it.

"That—That's..." Prowl tried to figure out how to avoid admitting exactly how amazing the work was—completed so _quickly_—because you don't just, just _tell_ people when they've done something amazing. But it was undeniable: Mesothulas's work was so very... very...

Prowl picked up his drink to avoid having to reply. His hand was trembling slightly.

###

After two hours, a combined six drinks later, and one relocation from the bar to a booth so they'd stop dropping their datapads on the other side of the bar in their excitement, they had not only finished their initial project to improve the spark scanner but also entirely forgotten that it was the reason they'd been talking to each other in the first place.

Mesothulas sat with his chin in his hands, watching as Prowl painstakingly corrected all his scribbles into straight lines and right angles. He was using a second datapad as a straightedge. Mesothulas said, "No, I don't worship any of the—I sort of believe that the, uh, if anyone's a god—it's everyone, you know? Everyone's their own god."

"What," Prowl mumbled, "do you mean, literally, divine with powers and..."

"No no no, divine powers is dumb."

Prowl slapped down his straight edge, starting Mesothulas into sitting upright, and pointed at Mesothulas with the stylus. "It _is_ dumb! It's _so_ d— It just doesn't work, scientifically, you can't just modify reality li—"

"—yes the kind of energy it would take to arbitrarily alter the fabric of—"

"—stupidest—"

"Anyway no." Mesothulas sank back into his hands. "I mean, I mean as in, ‘god’ as in ‘master of your own destiny.’ And capable of, of—like, insurmountable unmeasurable power, but, not _instantaneously_, over _time_, you've obviously got to put out the energy in a way that obeys the rules of thermodynamics—"

"—obviously." Prowl returned to his work, now using the rim of an empty glass to draw in the curves on the blueprints.

"But and, and—yeah." Mesothulas lost his train of thought for a moment, marveling at how Prowl deftly zoomed in and out on the datapad so that he could use a single glass to draw curves of every size. Prowl paused, glancing toward Mesothulas, waiting; and Mesothulas was suddenly keenly aware of the fact that Prowl was actually paying attention to what he had to say. "And that everyone's got their own purpose, the thing that they are to do—"

Prowl looked back down and kept drawing. "Like a function?”

"No! Functionism is dumb. A purpose isn't a function. Function is, is—your body, and purpose is your spark, the thing that calls to you what you have to do."

"Does it have to be your spark?" Prowl asked, which was a far milder challenge to Mesothulas's philosophy than he had been expecting. "Can it be the brain."

"I'm—" Mesothulas tried to think about where he felt his purpose rooted. He felt it surge and throb in his spark, this need to _become_; but in becoming, it had passed through his brain module and into reality. "Sure, maybe, I guess—"

"I like it." Prowl nodded sharply. "It's better than—" He fell silent, frowning, and Mesothulas could see his optics darting back and forth like he was searching the tabletop for the right words. "I don't like worshipping things, I don't like the idea of worshipping things. Worship only works if you presume the thing you're worshipping is infallible, and I can't presume that. Outside gods demand too much."

Mesothulas nodded. “Yes, the temples and the rules and the, the—"

"If you're your own god," Prowl went on, "if you're only worshipping yourself—you're still fallible. But at least when you're making all your own... moral, philosophical decisions, you're not compounding your own fallibilities with somebody else's. That's—there's less room for error if you limit the amount of people's bad ideas you're listening to."

"Right." Was Prowl done talking this time? "Right, yeah, that's—one less idiot."

Prowl laughed, which startled the hell out of Mesothulas, because he didn't know Prowl could do that. "Idiot. Idiot gods. We're a bunch of idiot gods."

Mesothulas smiled. "Trying to bring our profound purpose to fruition, like idiots."

"That makes sense," Prowl said, and gestured to a passing waiter for another couple of drinks.

###

Prowl had kind of hoped that being drunk might make optic contact easier, the way it made it easier for Prowl to talk—not easier to find the perfect words to make himself understood, but easier to conclude that the words he'd found were good enough; he'd never been drunk around somebody whose face he _wanted_ to look at—or rather, somebody he wanted to _think_ he wanted to look at their face, since staring at someone’s face had never seemed quite as important to him as other bots made it out to be—so he'd never tested it. But even thoroughly inebriated, Prowl couldn't quite make sustained optic contact with Mesothulas.

He could look at the rest of him, though—memorizing the dimensions of the gaudy purple and neon green planes of his chest and arms. He could glance at his face in brief spurts, enough to be sure he'd remember the color of Mesothulas's optics. His gaze kept going back to Mesothulas's shoulders—he'd never seen tires embedded in someone's shoulders quite like that before—before getting distracted again by the way his golden hands fluttered and gesticulated.

Arms crossed and slouched forward so his bumper rested on the table, Prowl asked, "Why did you tell them it wasn't real?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Mesothulas was gesturing even more emphatically now that he was talking about his work. "The officer in charge of the case showed me all the evidence that said the Spindleback was doing the, the stuff, and I was like, pbbbth." Prowl bit back a laugh. "No, I said, I've been compiling _more_ evidence for _forever,_ and here's why all of those things are not Spindleback evidence but evidence of—of the not being at all the Spindleback. Which isn't real."

Prowl had been looking at Mesothulas’s tires again—he was wondering if they’d spin freely if he poked at the treads—but he forgot about the tires as he exclaimed, “That's what I told him! I said, I said that's dumb, you're dumb, for thinking that that's—"

"See, that's the thing." Mesothulas's voice got quieter, so Prowl leaned closer. "If you tell them they're dumb, they think _you're_ dumb. You've got to go, hmmm. Let me see. I see why you think that. And then, you _show_ them they're dumb. Instead of saying it. That way they think they figured it out themselves instead of being told it."

Prowl blinked, absorbing that knowledge. He'd learned more about Cybertronian psychology in thirty seconds than in the past decade. "But I didn't _say_ he was dumb, I just—let him know."

"Oh, uh-huh." Mesothulas nodded.

"I told him why all the evidence is, nnnot good."

Mesothulas leaned forward and said earnestly, "He should've listened to you."

"Yeah. Yeah. " Prowl nodded. "Yeah. I thought he was calling you in to help him find it. I thought you were—gonna—play along with the—say oh yeah, it's so real, we can definitely find it—"

"Hyeheh, that's what he _thought_ he was calling me for. No, I told him he was dumb."

"I was—I was so torqued because I thought—you're out here, making a quick buck playing along with his delusions—"

"Yeah, n—no, I am. Playing along is part of it." Mesothulas made a complicated pantomime that Prowl worked out was supposed to indicate snapping something invisible in half. "But you, uh, break the delusions by the end."

"Primus below. You're like..." Try as he might, Prowl couldn't find an accurate word. "You're... an anti con artist. A—a half con artist. Semi con artist. Who's smart."

Prowl had not meant to include that last bit. He froze. Maybe he'd made his verbal filter a little _too_ loose.

Mesothulas didn't comment on it. But he did smile. Prowl found masked mechs easier to talk to—despite what most of his peers griped, he always found their moods much easier to read, their body language clearer and less ambiguous. Perhaps because so many people expressed their emotions with their faces, which Prowl found to be near inscrutable ink blot tests that could be interpreted a thousand different ways, mechs with masks compensated by limiting and standardizing their body language. That was what Prowl theorized, anyway. A curved mouth with upturned corners could be any of a million different highly nuanced expressions; but curved optics were almost always a simple happy smile.

Mesothulas said, "Yeah, if it's not true, I say that. If it looks like it _is_ true I go, oh. Maybe it's a thing. But only when it's true."

"_Is_ it true?" Prowl asked. "Sometimes? Are there true things."

"Uhhh..." Mesothulas made an uncertain gesture. "I've seen a couple of things I can't prove _aren't_ true."

"Whoa."

“What, do _you_ believe some of them might be true? I thought you didn't believe in any of them."

Prowl _didn’t_ believe in any of them. He took a moment to mentally reassess his position. “Well. I _didn’t_. But if you're, out here, going, doing—" He grabbed one of the datapads they’d been scrawling on and gestured at a random selection of blueprints, “_this_, then—obviously you did _real science_ on it, and—"

“Yes, the real science is crucially important.”

“Yes! _Yes!_” Prowl pointed emphatically at Mesothulas. “If it's scienced I believe it.”

“‘Scienced’.” Mesothulas tittered.

Prowl paused. “Scienced." Okay. His verbal filter was too low. They should maybe call it a day. They’d already figured out their original project…

Except then Mesothulas gestured for a couple more drinks and Prowl promptly threw that resolution out the window. He turned his FIM chip back on and very carefully set it to 32%—no—26% effectiveness.

###

“Yeah, no, I—I miss Iacon. I miss the culture of working in Iacon.”

If Prowl’s bumper weren’t holding him up, Mesothulas mused, he would probably be sprawled on the table by now. Which would be fine, because _Mesothulas_ was sprawled on the table, one arm weaving between their empty glasses and the other barely holding his chin up from the tabletop, as he listened to Prowl talk.

Prowl had tilted a square glass onto a corner with a fingertip and was spinning it around with his thumb, careful not to splash the last few drops in the glass onto the table. “Kaon is—it's the snobs, and it's the normal, reasonable people who are angry at the snobs. And I can't hang out with the normal, reasonable people because I work with the snobs. So they're angry at me."

Sympathetically, Mesothulas said, ”Oh, that's—that's mean."

“It's not mean! Because, yeah. The snobs are jerks. And then we're going out and—all our cases are against normal, reasonable people—the snobs are up to awful things too?” Prowl gave Mesothulas a pleading look, like he was searching for agreement, so Mesothulas nodded enthusiastically even though he had no idea what Kaonite snobs got up to. “We’re not arresting the snobs. I don't like it. Investigating murder cases was nice. If a murder happened, somebody definitely actually did something wrong and all I had to do was collect evidence, I didn't have to decide what to do with it. I didn’t have to make the arrests or decide the charges or—any of that. Just get the evidence.”

Mesothulas sat back slightly. “Oh, I thought you were, one of the—coppy cops."

“No, not until Kaon.” Prowl left off spinning the glass, and started balancing empty ones on top of each other. “I sorta... sometimes cop, usually not.”

Mesothulas nodded, somewhat relieved to hear that. Not that he hadn’t already accepted that Prowl was, in fact, a cop, and this was just something Mesothulas was going to have to deal with in order to enjoy the fruits of the supercalculator spitting digits out of his head; but a sometimes-cop was much less intimidating.

“And it's—not good. I don't like it here. I don't like what we're doing under Sentinel. It seems…” Prowl grimaced spectacularly in the most overt display of facial expressions Mesothulas had witnessed out of him so far, “wwwrrrrrn it feels _wrong_ to say 'wrong' because... the people who are upholding the law shouldn't be the wrong ones."

“Cops are awful,” Mesothulas said with an earnest lack of self-preservation. “Especially in Kaon.”

“I—y—you're the one who said it. But I'm going to, nnnot disagree with you.” (And Mesothulas felt a little bit more relieved.) “I hate it. I feel like I should... either _do_ something about it or, or get out of it."

“You said you miss Iacon. You could go back?" Mesothulas might run into Prowl more often if he were based in Iacon again.

He shrugged. ”I could. But now I realize, Iacon's probably, it must be the same. I just didn't see it from my current job."

“Hmm. Yeah, probably."

More quietly, Prowl said, ”I liked Iacon better though. Everyone under Sentinel is a jock. I can't _stand_ the jocks. I worked with nerds in Iacon. I get along with nerds." He rolled a glass in the space between their arms.

“What, like scientists?” Mesothulas asked hopefully.

“No, we were still—in Iacon, we were sciency cops. I like sciency cops. I'm a sciency cop. _You’re_ a sciency scientist."

Still hopefully, Mesothulas asked, “Do you like sciency scientists?"

Prowl paused. He set the rolling glass back upright. ”Well, you're the only one I know, uh, right now. I mean—I know Wheeljack, obviously, you met him, but he’s more of an engineer—a sciency engineer—a jocky sciency engineer—”

Again, Mesothulas pressed, “Well, _do_ you?"

Prowl froze. “Maybe?” His gaze flicked to his hand. Which was the first Mesothulas noticed that it had migrated onto one of his shoulder tires.

They both stared at the finger frozen in the middle of tracing Mesothulas’s tread. Mesothulas was suddenly intensely aware of how the bar had filled up as the afternoon wore on.

Prowl jerked his hand back, sat up straight, and mumbled an apology. “I wanted to see if it could turn.”

Mesothulas processed that. Then lifted himself up on his elbows slightly, and spun his tires. A smile _nearly_ crossed Prowl’s face.

Mesothulas felt inexplicably warm.

###

“I think I need people around me,” Mesothulas mumbled, “even when they annoy me.”

The bar had emptied out again as the conference attendees finished their drinks and conversations and left. The glasses had been cleaned off their table except for a couple of new, weak drinks they’d ordered to justify keeping their booth a little longer.

Now, nearly alone, in the dim and quiet, Prowl listened intently as Mesothulas spoke.

“I'm—I think I'm an introvert until I _am_ alone, but then when I am, I'm like... do I matter to people? Do I matter if there's no one around me to see what I'm doing?”

This was the most subdued Prowl had ever seen Mesothulas. Which, admittedly, added up to about twelve hours, but still.

"I read something,” Prowl said, “that, it's unnatural for everyone to live alone, like we try to do now—that actually, barracks are healthier for people, because then you get to live with so many other people—“

"I feel like I don't exist when I'm not witnessed."

Oh okay he wasn’t done. ”Uh-huh."

“It feels like—when I'm alone, I'm fading away. Cybertron keeps turning and I'm dissolving."

Prowl hesitated. This was—way over his emotional competence threshold. He was not equipped to provide assistance to personal problems like this. They didn’t even let him interview crime victims; they said he sounded too much like he was interrogating them. He couldn’t handle other people’s emotions. “So—so, this, uh, dissolving—are you hallucinating or—"

“No, like, emotionally dissolving.”

“Oh." That ruled out suggesting psychiatric help, so Prowl was out of options. He’d just listen.

"I'm stagnating,” Mesothulas said, “I know I am. I had so much momentum when I started—when I knew my coworkers at the lab I left behind were watching me, waiting for me to fail—“ He shrugged limply. “They stopped caring and now here I am, cruising along, just, just not—doing anything. The same old routines, halfheartedly investigating the bland new cryptid rumor of the week—I wanted to discover, I wanted to find something new…”

Prowl was briefly possessed by the urge to reach across the table again, maybe to catch one of Mesothulas’s listlessly gesturing hands. It was a strange, unfamiliar urge. But that was out of line—and not helpful. Be helpful. Suggest something helpful. ”You could, uh, you c—if you want to be watched, you could do a—there are podcasts, or something—"

"I could. I guess. But it's— There's nobody to push me to find new things—"

“Or,” Prowl went on, “if you _did_ discover something you could write scientific papers, or papers about your progress—"

"I never write papers, I don't have the patience for it."

Deeply horrified, Prowl whispered, “But you've invented so much new ghost-debunking stuff."

”I need…” Mesothulas’s gestures looked frustrated, fingers curling like he was trying to grasp at something elusive. “Sssomeone. Someone who actually knows me. And cares about—what I'm doing. And pushes me to make progress. To innovate. To—to get closer to my purpose, instead of idling where I am." He picked up one of their datapads of scribbly notes and waved it. “Like this."

“Huh.” Prowl thought about that. And then, looking at the datapad they’d filled together, he _thought_ about that. “Huh.”

###

Prowl’s head was pounding.

He bore it with a stoic grimace that, to any observer, wouldn’t look any different from his typical slightly-less-pleased-than-usual expressions.

He’d returned to Wheeljack’s booth early, hoping that he could add his and Mesothulas’s work to the touch board before Wheeljack arrived. No such luck. He was halfway through transcribing when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder, making him start.

“Sooo!” Wheeljack said. “I saw you and the purple guy at a booth yesterday afternoon. You uh, working on this?” In his peripheral vision, Prowl caught Wheeljack nodding at the board.

Prowl’s armor crawled under the unwelcome touch. His pride didn’t want Wheeljack to think it had really taken the two of them all day to work out _this_ little math, but his shame didn’t want Wheeljack to know that they’d actually spent all that time just talking to each other, in a private booth, alone— “Yes.”

“Really? All that time?”

What was that, surprise or suspicion? “Drinks and math don’t mix very well.” He shook Wheeljack’s hand off his shoulder.

“No, I guess not…”

Wheeljack wasn’t looking toward Prowl anymore. Prowl turned to follow his gaze, and felt his spark’s axis tilt funny. Mesothulas was several booths away, looking at him. He turned quickly away when Prowl met his gaze. Prowl averted his gaze just as fast, returning to copying notes.

“Aha,” Wheeljack said, like he thought he’d just figured something out.

“Don’t.” Prowl started writing faster.

“I didn’t say anything.” Wheeljack paused. “I just—well. I’ve seen _that_ look—“

Prowl froze. He thought of Sentinel’s judgmental glare. He thought of his career. “Nothing happened,” he snapped.

“Hey.” Wheeljack lowered his voice. “Prowl, I’m not gonna say anything. I don’t mind. I just—well, I knew you’d come from Iacon, but I didn’t know you were the type to—“

“He _tried_,” Prowl said icily. “I _ran_.”

When the bar had finally closed, Mesothulas had said, haltingly, that he had notes on a couple of unfinished projects in his room, if Prowl wanted to take a look at them, maybe help Mesothulas work out why they weren’t quite working…

Prowl’s spark had pirouetted and his fuel tank had dropped. And he’d thought about how Tumbler had screamed at him on the night he’d left for Kaon. And then Prowl had been outside the hotel, wondering whether he’d actually bothered to say anything to Mesothulas before turning and leaving.

He had snapped on his FIM chip to 100%, driven for an hour, stopped on a barren stretch of road to throw up off the pavement, and kept driving. He hadn’t gone home, and he hadn’t returned to the hotel until dawn.

Wheeljack was silent a moment. “Oh.”

“So if you’d be so kind as to not assume that when I say ‘nothing happened,’ I’m trying to send you a coded message meaning the _exact opposite_—“

“Fine, fine. Sorry.”

Prowl resumed furiously scribbling notes.

As soon as he was done, he reassessed the list of remaining panels, decided that nothing happening on the last day of a conference was probably any good and cursed himself for missing almost all of yesterday’s presentations, and drove home early to Security Services.

###

Mesothulas spent the rest of the conference laying face down on his hotel room floor. He remained there for several hours after his scheduled check-out time, until housekeeping came in to clean up, spotted him prone on the floor, assumed he’d been murdered, and screamed.

#####

Case 2, Part 1: Sentinel Prime and the God of Death

###

"Prowl. Prowl." It was dark. No streetlights directly pointed into the Kaonite hotel window, but their ambient glow cast shadows on the ceiling.

Prowl shifted slightly. Mesothulas was supposed to be beside him, but Prowl groped blindly on the recharge slab and didn't feel him. "Mrrh?"

"Prowwwl." Mesothulas was _over_ Prowl, not on the slab. Hm.

"'S four inthe morning."

"I know, but this is important." Mesothulas bent over Prowl and whispered, his exvent brushing over his helm, light touches prickling at his audial: "Do you believe in magic?"

Prowl made a gesture that was one-half swatting Mesothulas away, one-half pulling him closer, and two-halves completely ineffective at anything but patting his face. "Is that a come-on or a question?"

Mesothulas giggled breathily. "A question. I want to know."

"Mph." Prowl sluggishly hooked an arm over Mesothulas's neck. Mesothulas pressed his crownlike crest to the side of Prowl's helm. "There's no empirical evidence for magic."

"No, but—okay, do you believe magic _could_ exist?"

Prowl let out a long sigh, and then fell silent. Mesothulas thought he might have gone back to sleep. He was just about to nudge him again when Prowl asked, "Can I define 'magic' as 'any insufficiently understood technology?'"

"Yyyee—no. It's got to be magic-magic."

Prowl groaned sleepily. "You'd have to define the exact parameters and criteria by which we'd define a hypothetical phenomenon as magic."

Mesothulas pressed his mouth to Prowl's audial, nipping at the rim. "You're so smart. You _sound_ smart."

"I'mgoin' backtosleep."

"But we need to define the—"

"Msanthlulas go back to sleep."

Mesothulas huffed quietly. He stayed there, bent over Prowl, head pressed to his head, until he was sure Prowl was again in recharge.

Then he gently disentangled himself. He chugged one of the sour complimentary energon cubes stacked in the hotel wash rack, and clicked his mask on. Mesothulas had some early morning errands—a meeting before dawn with a shady figure, and then a long trip to meet with some even shadier figures.

Prowl could sleep in.

#####


	3. Case 2, Part 2: Sentinel Prime and the God of Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't think I've got a lot to say about this one! But I'm also in a hurry today. Tags and such will be updated later.

Millions of years ago, Kaon had been known for its plentiful mines—not energon mines, but valuable ores useful for construction and medicine. Today, the overcrowded city was still populated by disaffected manual laborers and the politicians and entrepreneurs that had grown rich off their work; but the mines themselves were long empty, leaving behind gaping pits and subterranean hollows that made a logistical hell out of any construction project larger than a newspaper stand.

Some old mines had been turned into facilities for the elite—a strip mine into an amphitheater, a cavern into a moody underground bar—and others had been rented out to Kaon's working class inhabitants, who turned them into packed quarters or small businesses (some more legal than others). Some had been collapsed or filled in, in preparation of a new skyscraper being built on the surface above.

But many remained, empty and forgotten by all except their former laborers and a few studious geologists.

The New Society of the Resurrected Death was meeting in one such mine this month. Mesothulas had a hell of a time reaching it, even with the directions he'd been covertly passed that morning; he wasn't the most graceful climber in this bipedal mode, and motorcycle mode would have been completely useless. His paint was covered in scratches by the time he reached the temporary temple. The side of one leg and forearm had been scraped down to raw metal when he'd lost his footing and slid down a steep incline. Mesothulas noted, with a rare sense of solidarity, that most of the other cultists down here were similarly scratched up.

Mesothulas's gaze skimmed around the cavern. It had been set up almost like a lecture hall, sans the desks, with raised rows of rough benches carved in arcs around an altar at the bottom. There were only two visible entrances: the one Mesothulas had come in, at the top of the cavern, and a dark tunnel behind the altar. The familiar-looking altar—Mesothulas supposed the upper echelons of the cult must haul it around from temporary temple to temporary temple—was little more than two stone tables pressed together with an inch-wide gap between them. A heavy axe hung from the ceiling over the gap like a curved guillotine; its chain ran through a loop in the ceiling, and the end was wrapped tightly around a handle sticking out of the wall.

So far, there were about eighty people huddling and skulking together in little clusters—but it was still a half hour until worship was scheduled to begin, and people tended to drift in late. And despite how difficult it was to reach this location, this was already as many people as Mesothulas had seen last month, and half he didn't recognize. The cult was growing rapidly.

On their faces, Mesothulas could see nervousness, wariness, the smug smirks of disbelievers who'd come just so that they could later talk about how phony it had all been, the hollow hungry optics of the true believers waiting for a glimpse of their god.

All of them were waiting for Mortilus.

On one face, an unmistakable purple hexagon, Mesothulas couldn't see anything at all. He pushed past several clustered cultists as he climbed down the rows to reach him. Shockwave was speaking with a nervous-looking army-builder jet, who hastily bid his farewells and escaped when Shockwave turned his spotlight-like gaze toward Mesothulas's greeting. "I'm _so_ pleased you could make it," Mesothulas gushed. "I was concerned you wouldn't, when we didn't cross paths after I received my directions. Whoever did you find to tell you where we were?"

"This had better not be a waste of my time," Shockwave said. "I spent hours getting down here, and will spend more getting home." Shockwave spoke in an even, intellectual-sounding monotone that reminded Mesothulas, not unpleasantly, of his dear Prowl. The primary differences between them were in how Prowl's deliberately-adopted generic Iaconian accent contrasted with Shockwave's far more archaic pronunciations, which clearly marked him out as one of the ancient mechs who had first learned to speak back when Primal Vernacular was simply "vernacular"; and in how Shockwave always sounded as though he were on the verge of a yawn, as though he were perpetually bored with whatever conversation he was having.

"I expect you'll find it quite educational," Mesothulas reassured Shockwave.

"Educational? On the _gods_?" Shockwave's lack of a face betrayed nothing, but he somehow managed to convey a sneer anyway.

"No, no—on what the charlatans claiming to be them are doing these days." Mesothulas eagerly stood next to the brilliant alchemist/natural philosopher/occultist. (Prowl would have put every one of those titles in quotation marks.) Mesothulas _never_ got Shockwave all to himself for this long. Oh, how he looked forward to picking his mind for the next half hour. "At a minimum, I think you'll find it most diverting."

"I'm not interested in being _diverted_ from my purposes."

Mesothulas was already losing Shockwave's interest. Grasping for another reason for him to stay, he said, "Then—you can—consider it an opportunity to _network_."

Shockwave fixed Mesothulas with a long, withering look. But he simply said, "Hm," and turned forward to face the altar. Mesothulas felt his spark sinking. He turned toward the altar as well.

After a moment, Shockwave said, "There are a great many tricks one can use to fake mastery over death. I wonder which one our 'Mortilus' shall use."

"Oh, it's—You'll see. I don't want to ruin the surprise."

"I'm difficult to surprise."

"Of course, of course." And he was not, Mesothulas suspected, going to be very pleased about having information withheld from him for Mesothulas's own entertainment; so he quickly changed the topic. "So per our recent discussion, I've found myself reading up on Titans, and I must say, the resources I've found have been woefully incomplete compared to the information you alluded to when last we spoke. Perhaps you could elaborate on their omissions?"

He'd been hoping that Shockwave would talk some more about the Titan in Crystal City. Instead he said, "I suppose none of your resources had a complete list of all the worlds that our Titans landed on."

Mesothulas's voice went up an octave. "They didn't."

The room filled out over the next half hour. There were, Mesothulas estimated, about two hundred fifty mechs in the audience, sworn cultists and curious novices alike. Stragglers were still trickling in when a couple of mechs painted in corpse matte gray and dried energon purple that Mesothulas recognized as Mortilus's top priests appeared on either side of the altar.

"Ah, here we go," Mesothulas murmured. He was almost disappointed. Shockwave was an enthralling conversationalist. (They had, Mesothulas had discovered gleefully, similar spiritual beliefs; while Mesothulas thought all Cybertronians were gods with a purpose they had the potential to fulfill, Shockwave considered them all potential gods who didn’t ascend to divinity until they’d fulfilled their purpose.)

The guillotine-like axe swayed as one of the priests unwrapped the chain from its handle and held it tight. Meanwhile, the larger of the two priests, a tank carrying an oversized spear with an electric pink head, thunked the spear on the ground several times to call the attention of the crowd. "Death approaches," he announced. "Many seek out the gods and their chosen ones in hopes of witnessing them perform miracles. Today, you will witness the opposite of a miracle."

Mesothulas snorted derisively, to make sure Shockwave knew what he thought of this performance. Shockwave didn't twitch.

Once the crowd had quieted, from the tunnel behind the altar, "Mortilus" emerged. Mesothulas heard quiet gasps from a few newcomers. Mortilus was the size of two already-rather-large mechs put together, and his kibble was unnervingly hard to parse; he clearly turned into _something,_ but _what_ was impossible to determine at a glance—except that it was a heavy instrument of war. He was painted the same corpse gray as his priests, but his armor glittered in the low light. There was, indeed, something godly about his presence—something powerful and uncontrollable.

He gazed out imperiously at the crowd. "I see your numbers have grown. I welcome you into the domain of death." He spread his arms out, taking in the audience; he could probably sweep the whole front row into an embrace if he wanted. "I see many of you have been here before. You are my true followers: you who have come to believe, and who still have the courage to return to me and face your death once again. Those of you who are here for the first time—I know you do not believe. You're merely curious. Or perhaps here to try to disprove my godhood. At best, some of you _want_ to believe—so much so that you've convinced yourselves that you already do.

"I shall make all of you true believers. Witness my divinity, and my mastery over death!"

Mortilus lay down on the altar, so his waist was over the gap between the two stones. The smaller priest—he looked like he transformed into some sort of horned quadruped—let go of the chain, and the axe dropped from the ceiling, straight through Mortilus's waist, and crashed to the ground. Most of the audience gasped, including quite a few mechs who'd been there before. The jet that Shockwave had been speaking to earlier squawked in surprise and slapped a hand over his mouth.

Mortilus was still for as long as it took for the echoes of the axe's crash to stop reverberating through the tunnels—and then his knees drew up, to more shocked gasps. His legs scooted to the end of the altar and stood by themselves. He dragged his upper torso away from the axe and stood on his hands. The smaller priest reached up to grab the end of the chain and dragged it down hand over hand, raising the axe again. The gasps turned into cries and screams as both halves of Mortilus's body walked together to meet in the middle of the altar. His legs leaned back against the altar, and he effortlessly set his torso down atop them.

By the time Mortilus was standing whole, arms once again outstretched to his audience, a condescending smirk twisting his face, his cultists were wailing in horror and rapture. Some mechs were sobbing and gibbering. A few had dropped to their knees in supplication. One new believer was clawing off a Matrix painted on his chest above his spark.

Mesothulas, who was watching the show for the fourth time, all but ignored the second half in favor of scribbling in a datapad he'd pulled from behind his chest armor. Just loud enough for Shockwave to hear, Mesothulas said, "I confess it's a spectacular visual effect, but once the shock wears off, anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of anatomy would realize that being severed at the waist was never going to be fatal."

"The average mech is a slave to his emotions," Shockwave droned. "He will interpret his own sudden horror and subsequent relief as adequate proof of this Mortilus's divinity, regardless of the strength of any physical evidence for or against it."

Mesothulas, who was plenty emotional but liked to think he wasn't a slave to it, made a noncommittal noise. He held out the datapad for Shockwave. "It would have been far _more_ impressive if he'd extracted the spark from someone's chest and then put it back in place," he said. "Far more obviously fatal, to the layman. And the science is sound."

Mesothulas watched Shockwave's face eagerly as he glanced over the rudimentary blueprints for Mesothulas's spark extractor.

"As you know," Mortilus boomed, drawing Mesothulas's attention, "once, I fought with my four brothers. I diminished them all almost to nothing—but so, too, did they diminish me. My strength is not what it was. I come among you to find my protégé. To test you, until I find one worthy of my position—a successor to my godhood."

The repeat visitors slouched down and shrank back in their seats. Mesothulas didn't know why they bothered. Anyone with a keen optic ought to have realized that Mortilus only chose bots to test from among the new arrivals. He noticed the jet that Shockwave had been speaking to earlier scoot forward and sit straighter. The new arrival clearly didn’t know he was among those who ought to have been shrinking back.

"I will test one mech each time I appear before you. If he proves worthy to be my successor, you will _all_ receive my blessing—a gift for having witnessed such a miracle. If not... you will still receive a lesser blessing." Mortilus smirked cruelly. "For entertaining me."

Mesothulas huffed. It sounded cheesier each time he heard it.

"You!" Mortilus pointed at a small green car. The car pointed at his chest. "Yes! Step forward. I can sense a black light in your spark. Today, I test you."

The car stood uncertainly. Mortilus nodded, beckoning him closer. With trembling legs, he walked down the rough levels of the amphitheater to stand with Mortilus before the altar.

Mesothulas glanced at Shockwave. He had propped the datapad against his gun and was typing.

Mortilus said, "You have a choice: to be tested by me, or by the axe."

Quickly, the car said, "By you, sir. Sire. God? Lord."

"Very well!" Mortilus dropped down into a fighting stance, fists raised.

The car looked at the fists, each larger than his entire torso, and said, "Did I say you? I meant the axe, my lord."

Mortilus sighed, scowling. "Very well." He straightened up, gesturing to the altar. Mortilus's two priests seized the bot and lifted him onto the stones, and latched him in place with what Mesothulas recognized as stasis cuffs—the heavy-duty kind that numbed your arms and sealed your subspace pockets. Those were a new addition to the show. They weren't supposed to have those, were they? Wasn't that some kind of contraband? Prowl would know.

Shockwave passed the datapad back to Mesothulas. "It would be even _more_ impressive if he actually killed someone, and then used an energon elixir to bring him back to life," he said. "The science is sound."

Mesothulas read over the chemical equation and his knees went weak. "Is it _really?_" He started skimming over the instructions to create it.

"Should you fail this test, may my brother have mercy on your spark."

Mesothulas's head jerked up. The axe had been raised above the car, who hadn't been given the courtesy of being strapped with his waist under the axe, but his chest. "Ssscrap." He'd been distracted. To Shockwave, he said, "I suggest you make yourself scarce," and then sent out three comm pings.

The doors at the back of the temporary temple banged open. "Freeze!" Prowl shouted. "New Society of the Resurrected Death, you are all under arrest for assembling in an unauthorized facility to watch an illegal blood sport." He pointed at Mortilus's priests. "And all of _you_ are under arrest for attempted murd—"

The priest holding the axe's chain was so startled he let go. The green car screamed, then gurgled.

Prowl winced. "For _successful_ murder..." He looked around the room, probably searching for Mesothulas to glare at. Mesothulas shrank down.

Prowl pointed again—at Mortilus, who was trying to sneak sideways, away from his priests. "And _you_—for organizing and participating in an illegal bloodsport, for impersonating a member of the Hand, and for thirty-eight—thirty-_nine_ murders—you are under arrest, Overlord of Thymesis."

The room burst into nervous murmurs. There were a couple of cries of alarm, a few of anger.

Mortilus—Overlord—said, "Oh. Hm."

Overlord had quite the interesting alt-mode—unique, as far as Mesothulas knew—in that he had two of them. But not like a triplechanger, although he was easy to mistake for one in root-mode. When he transformed, half of him became a fighter jet and the other half became a tank, remotely connected to each other via some unknown signal. Without knowing the secret, it was nigh impossible to figure out what he turned into just from observing his kibble. (Unless you were a master at manipulating 3D models in your head, of course—it had been Prowl who'd taken Mesothulas's footage of "Mortilus" and connected it with the only known Cybertronian with two alt-modes.) And, conveniently, the pieces popped apart right at his waist.

It was absolutely fascinating. Mesothulas was dying for an opportunity to examine Overlord thoroughly once he was under arrest. Prowl had warned him that was unlikely, but still, hope sprang eternal.

Overlord looked Prowl up and down in a way that made Mesothulas want to go for his optics. "I've seen you on the news, little cop bot," he said. "Prowl of Praxus, isn't it?" (Mesothulas glanced back at Prowl to watch as he scowled and muttered "_Petrex,_" as well as a few other things Mesothulas couldn't quite work out.) "You had a partner, though. Now that I think of it, I’m sure I've seen him here a few times."

Mesothulas felt Overlord's gaze fall on him like a red spotlight. His joints froze. "Yes, there you are. One of my _faithful._ Pity." He heard Prowl hurry down to stand beside him.

"Here's the issue, little cop bot. What I've heard about the two of you is that you're _ghost hunters._ You run around, chasing imaginary monsters through the sewers. I suppose that explains why you're here—just your luck that for once you _did_ find a real monster."

"No luck," Prowl said sharply. "Just thorough, professional investigative work." Mesothulas snorted in amusement. Prowl was so maddeningly _earnest_ about the investigative procedure. How Mesothulas adored him.

"Be that as it may, it means you two aren't really cops. You don't have the authority to arrest me." Overlord grabbed the chain of the massive axe, yanked its loop out of the ceiling, and spun the axe by its chain. The two front rows of cultists scrambled out of the way. "Nor do you have the strength."

"You're right. We don't," Prowl said. "But _he_ does."

"Who—?"

A rocket-powered train smashed through the wall and ran down Overlord.

###

Without anything else he was allowed to do, Prowl had sat down on the lowest row of the amphitheater to watch while Security Services arrested and removed the audience. He was sure a good two-thirds of the audience would spend at most a night in a cell and then be released in the morning with no charges, since most of them hadn't known they were coming down here to watch Overlord play out his snuff fantasies. But then, Mesothulas had told him, many members of the audience _were_ return viewers. How many of them? He wondered. And wondered, further, whether they'd be let off lighter if they professed that they really had thought Overlord was Mortilus. Would that make a difference?

He didn't know. It wasn't his job to figure that sort of thing out anymore.

Mesothulas had spent the last twenty minutes fussing over the poor car that got axed, seeing if he could perform a miracle on him. From Prowl's vantage point, Mesothulas’s efforts mostly consisted of getting on the nerves of the actual medics who'd come along, muttering angrily to himself, and occasionally yelling about how he _could_ have saved him if only he'd had the right tools for the job with him. Considering that most of the tools Mesothulas was listing were either 1) not portable, or 2) millions of shanix, Prowl decided there probably had never been much hope for the car.

"Thank you for your assistance in this case."

At Sentinel Prime's voice, Prowl shot to his feet, went halfway into a salute before remembering that he wasn't in Security Services anymore, then finished the salute anyway since he figured the Prime warranted it even if he wasn't Prowl's actual boss anymore. "Sir."

Sentinel nodded, gesturing for Prowl to stand at ease. "Your investigative materials on this cult were invaluable."

"Ah—yes. Thank you, sir. I'm glad that my and Mesothulas's investigation was so helpful." He put perhaps just a tad more emphasis on Mesothulas's name than was necessary.

Sentinel's gaze flicked over to Mesothulas—Prowl couldn't quite read his face, but he didn't think the look was approving—before returning to Prowl. "When we're finished here, I'll have to ask you... and _him_ to come by HQ, to give your statements on this whole incident. Considering how deeply involved you are, it will probably be a lengthy interview."

"Yes, sir. We anticipated that." Prowl hesitated. "If it's not inappropriate, given our relative positions and former professional relationship, to ask for a small favor..."

Sentinel laughed gruffly. "You wouldn't have brought it up if you weren't already confident it was acceptable."

"It's not my call to make."

"I trust your judgment. Ask."

Prowl nodded. "I would appreciate it if Mesothulas and I could be put early in the queue of people to be interviewed. We'd—like to be out of HQ before evening."

"Oh?" Sentinel's voice was just a little lower, just a little slower, and icy cold. "Do you two have plans?" Prowl's fuel went icy cold as well.

When you live in Iacon, there's plausible deniability when you say you have a partner. It could mean either business partner or romantic partner—so much the better if your partner was both—and everyone was polite enough not to ask you to clarify. When in doubt, it was courteous to operate as if you assumed that an acquaintance's relationship was purely professional—and to swear to that assumption if asked by someone less broad-minded then the average Iaconian urbanite.

Sentinel's time in Iacon serving the Senate had made him just metropolitan enough to know not to _ask_. But, when he was unsure, he nevertheless wanted to _find out_, and not for broad-minded reasons. And Prowl was terrified of what it would mean for his currently cordial Kaonite connections if Sentinel decided he and Mesothulas were closer than colleagues. Sentinel liked Prowl, but not enough to accept that.

"Mesothulas needs us to swing by his old lab for something." (Prowl was often criticized for having a face that was inscrutable when he was feeling anything except rage. He didn't know why that was something to criticize. He found it far more useful than detrimental.) "We don't want to get there too late." Was that enough for Sentinel? "It would be easier if we can both go, but if that's unworkable, it's most important that he get out by evening."

For a moment, all Sentinel said was, "Hmm." But the chill was gone from the air. Apparently, being told they didn't have to leave _together_ was enough to eliminate the suspicion it was a date night. "He obtained an alt-mode exemption very young, didn't he? What _was_ he doing before he was doing... this? "

"I—" Prowl shrugged helplessly. "Honestly, every time I think I've heard about every field he's worked in, he'll mention a new one I've never heard of before."

"Hm. And his old lab is...?"

"In Iacon, sir."

"That's a long drive." Sentinel was silent a moment, with that look on his face that Prowl had learned meant no one else was allowed to speak yet. "I'm not letting you out of there without full debriefings. But I'll see what I can arrange."

"Thank you, sir."

The four triplechangers that had been put in charge of removing Overlord hollered as he started trying to shake himself free. "Duty calls," Sentinel muttered, cracking his knuckles with a metallic twang. Prowl winced at the sound. He watched as Sentinel climbed the amphitheater two rows at a time— Did Overlord really just challenge Sentinel to a fistfight? _Really?_

Mesothulas's loud sigh startled Prowl; the sigh dissolved into a snorting laugh at Prowl's jump. "Sorry." Mesothulas plopped down to sit. "You don't mind, do you? I know _you're_ still talking with all your old friends, but _my_ fellow cultists have all either been arrested or fled the scene of the crime. You're the only one left that I recognize." Mesothulas poked a paint-free scrape on Prowl's wrist that he'd gotten while trying to climb down to this temple.

Prowl used his leg to nudge what he suspected was a similar scrape on Mesothulas's shin. "Who fled?"

Mesothulas waved away the question. "Oh, it—this was his first time coming and I didn't tell him what to expect. He's innocent."

Mesothulas had a very short list of people he might consider inviting _anywhere_, much less to an event like this, and Prowl sincerely doubted any of them were innocent; but he decided not to press. For now. "Of course I don't mind." Prowl joined him in sitting. It was nice to have a break from—everyone else. He glanced toward the altar. "Well?"

"No good."

They watched as the medics lay several patches over the gap in the car's graying chest to hold his body together during transport. Prowl craned his neck, trying to see whether the patches were adhesive or magnetic. Before he left he'd had a _talk_ with Sentinel about how magnetic patches damaged under-armor forensic evidence.

"If you'd called me in a bit sooner..."

"Well, if you hadn't _startled_ everyone," Mesothulas snipped.

Which was true. When Prowl had come in, the priest was still holding the chain. He’d probably been startled into letting go. Prowl had been trying to—well—he'd followed his training. But Sentinel's Security Services didn't exactly score high on de-escalating situations, did they? He should have known better.

Mesothulas nudged him. "Oh, don't look like that. I didn't mean it."

"You're right, though."

"I don't _want_ to be _right,_ I—" Mesothulas sighed. "You weren't holding the chain. It wasn't your responsibility."

"Maybe not. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have done something different to prevent it."

"You're ridiculous."

Was that supposed to be affectionate or properly scolding? Prowl wasn't quite sure. He didn't want to ask. It was probably time to change the topic; he didn't think Mesothulas would empathize with his guilt over letting someone die who didn't have to. Of all the wonderful, breathtaking things that Mesothulas's mind could do near effortlessly, sometimes Prowl strongly suspected that "empathy" and "guilt" weren't on the list.

Prowl turned to glance up at the re-subdued Overlord, who, judging by his frown, hadn't received that fistfight he wanted. "Impersonating a god. Can you believe it?" Prowl muttered. "It's— Beyond even normal impersonations, that's particularly perverse."

"I'm surprised you feel that strongly about it. Do you even believe in...?"

"The question of whether or not Mortilus is real is immaterial. There's something uniquely vile about exploiting someone's faith, and that remains true regardless of whether what they have faith in is real."

"Ah. Of course." They'd had a few discussions along that line before. It was one of the reasons Prowl disliked Mesothulas's tendency to "play along" with their clients before they identified the real source of a supposedly paranormal phenomenon, although he reluctantly agreed with its necessity. "I don't know," Mesothulas went on. "It sounds kind of fun."

"_What?!_"

"Doesn't it? You get to go around to people, going—" He put on a recognizable, but terrible, Overlord impression: "'Behold, frail mortals, I am a death god! Do my bidding!' Hyeheheh—no?"

Prowl shook his head, lips pursed.

"You don't think it sounds fun?" Mesothulas smiled. "_I_ think it sounds fun."

"No. Absolutely not. _Manipulating_ people like that? It doesn't sound the slightest bit fun." Prowl looked away from Mesothulas and his little smile, frowning.

He could still feel Mesothulas looking at him, though. Probably waiting to see whether Prowl was actually mad at him.

So Prowl snapped, "_You're_ ridiculous."

Mesothulas cackled and relaxed. "Seriously—_do_ you believe in Mortilus? I know what you think about the rest of the Hand," (specifically, Prowl thought that they were probably metaphors used to explain four of the most important aspects of Cybertronian culture and biology that later became accepted as literal fact, but he wasn't entirely willing to discount the possibility of literal godhood; Mesothulas thought they were real people who had been mythologized), "but I don't know how Mortilus fits in. Do you think _he's_ got a chance of being real?"

Prowl paused. "As much of a chance as the rest of the Hand, aside from Primus."

"'Aside from Primus'? I didn't know you made an exception for him."

"I read an article recently—I'll show you tomorrow—there's some archaeological evidence that Vector Sigma might have been able to transform. So, if it _is_ a dormant mech, I could believe that _that's_ literally Primus—"

"Hey!" Mesothulas yelled, waving. Prowl turned to see a slender mech bending over the corpse on the altar. "You're late! The medics and I already tried our best. There's nothing in the spark casing, don't waste your time."

Prowl put a hand on Mesothulas's upper arm, gently pushing it down. "No no, I know him. He's not a medic, he's a... hm. A cross between a medical examiner and a census taker. He updates population records whenever we—well, the Services—has a new death to report." Prowl nodded at him. "Hello, uh... Censure?"

"Censere," the mech corrected.

Prowl shrugged. "It's been a while."

Voice low, Mesothulas teased, "Medical examiner, huh. You must have been great friends in the Security Services.”

Prowl elbowed him. The fact that he'd never been certified as a medical examiner still galled him and Mesothulas _knew_ that. "He's only _like_ a medical examiner; I don't think he's actually— Anyway, he didn't work _for_ the Security Services. I saw him all the time at Iaconian crime scenes, too."

"He covers both Iacon and Kaon? What department is he in?"

Prowl shrugged and raised his voice again. "Hey, Censere. You've probably seen more deaths than everyone else here combined."

"Probably," Censere agreed mildly.

"Do _you_ believe in Mortilus?"

Censere considered the question for a moment, then shrugged. "I know _I've_ never met him."

###

"Never thought I'd be interviewing _you_," Fastback told Prowl, chuckling. "It's been a while, hasn't it? How's the, uh—"

"Paranormal debunking?"

"I was going to say ghost hunting."

"I know," Prowl said. "It's going fine. But let's focus on the interview."

"Right, right, of course." Fastback nodded. "So. Okay. Let's start at the beginning."

"Of course."

"What was your first involvement with the—"

"You skipped my name," Prowl said.

"I—" Fastback's visor flickered. "Sorry, what?"

"This is being recorded, right? You're supposed to start by asking me to give my name. That's procedure."

Fastback was silent a moment. "B— I _know_ your name, Prowl, we worked together for _cycles_."

"That's irrelevant. This is a formal police interview. Anyone listening to this recording later will expect to hear the interviewee's name at the beginning."

Fastback stared at Prowl.

Prowl stared back.

"... Would you please state your name for the record."

"Prowl of Petrex."

"Grand. Okay. Let's move on to the—"

Prowl leaned over the table to tap Fastback's datapad. "You're taking notes too, right? I remember what your reports were like."

Fastback stared at Prowl again.

"You'll save yourself a lot of time on the report later if you take notes as you go."

Fastback leaned forward and thunked his forehead on the table.

###

"So there I was," Mesothulas said, holding Bumper's audio recorder like a microphone, sitting on the back of his seat and gesturing with his free hand as he spoke. "Surrounded—_useless_—unable to do anything but _watch_ as the axe descended on the helpless little boat-bot's neck. The _sound_ it made—the _grinding_ of _metal_ on _metal_—I could hardly take it! His head tipped back, _teetered_ on the edge of the altar, _fell_—the slight of glistening pink fuel _oozing_ from the gap between the two stones, oh, even just _remembering_ the sight—" He put his hand on his chest, leaning backward in a faux swoon; when his chair threatened to tip back with him, he flailed to right himself with a startled blat. "Ahh! A-_hem!_ Anyway."

Bumper jumped to his feet when it looked like Mesothulas was going to fall, but when he recovered sat and propped his chin in his hand again, grinning. "And then what?"

"And then, the _cacophony_—Primus, you can't imagine the wailing and screaming—I don't know if the sight of one of their own being so callously murdered had driven them to _madness_ or _rapture_. I've little doubt it was some mix of both, from the contorted grins some of them wore. I waited for anyone to cry out in objection, in _outrage_, at the _senseless blasphemy_ we had just witnessed—but no, when the _false god_ decreed that his victim was an _unworthy_ successor and told us to ready ourselves, to a _one_—"

The door opened, and a second officer leaned in, looking puzzled.

"Oh, you just missed a good part! But I saw the show three more times; you'll catch up." Mesothulas beckoned the new officer closer. "Come in, come in, sit down. Where was I? Ah—to a one, the entire audience knelt before him, bowing their heads. Sickened though I was by the _travesty_ —no, no, that's not strong enough, is it?—by the _sacrilege_ I had witnessed, even more was I sickened by the thought that I should reveal myself as a nonbeliever, only for the _mob_ to fall upon me and tear me to _shreds_ in offering to their false god—so even I, too, _knelt_, driven not by concern for my _own_ safety, of course, but by the thought of how my poor partner _Prowl_ would suffer if I simply _vanished_, never to be seen again..."

###

Prowl, excruciatingly thorough though he was in all reports, both written and oral, did not have a theatrical strut in his structure. When he was released, only to be told that Mesothulas hadn't finished yet, he was disappointed, but not surprised.

"Too bad you can't stay longer," Jazz said, and Prowl thought he was one of only a handful of mechs who would say that to him because they meant it and not just because it was the polite thing one was expected to say. "Been a long time since I've had someone to go with to the Stanizian joint after work who won't complain about the food." There was a strong possibility that was only because Prowl didn't _eat_ the food—he only consumed liquid energon—but the point was moot.

"Maybe next time. I'm sure we'll have other jobs in Kaon."

Even though Security Services Headquarters was still so familiar to Prowl that every poster and flyer that had changed stood out, Jazz was escorting him down to the lobby. Prowl was no longer an officer, and so, in accordance with Security Services policy, he'd insisted that he wasn't allowed to wander around HQ unsupervised.

"Who knows when that'll be?" Jazz asked. "You're positive that you and Mesothulas have gotta run your errand today?"

"It absolutely _has_ to be today. We don't have any wiggle room,” Prowl said. “Really—I'm not just being stubborn and I'm not trying to wiggle out of socializing. I really _would_ like to stay if we could, but—"

"Relax," Jazz said. "I believe you. It's fine. Next time you're in Kaon."

"Or you're in Iacon."

The door opened to the lobby, and Jazz stopped there. "You'll have to tell me all about the paranormal investigation business then, all right?" He grinned. "And if we get any more weird cases here, I'll send them your way."

"We'd appreciate it."

The door slid shut. On the side of the lobby, Prowl found a bench that looked more like it belonged in a jail cell, and sat.

The lobby had a high ceiling, but poor lighting. The glass front doors led out to a covered driveway, and the sunlight slanting beneath the driveway tunnel didn’t quite reach the doors. Out of the direct sunlight, Prowl pulled out a datapad and continued working on his and Mesothulas’s paper on acoustics.

A few days ago, they’d had a chance to interview Mirage and thoroughly examine his den. Mirage had even arranged for them to do a similar examination of Cyclonus’s wash rack, where they’d had their audials chattered off by a waste disposal bot that Prowl had assumed had been hired to clean, until he noticed the apartment was full of step stools and stepladders for a minibot. (Mesothulas had smugly said he’d figured it out immediately, but refused to explain how.) With their examination done, they’d been able to recommend some simple insulation changes Mirage could make to block the singing; and Prowl could finally get to work on writing a proper paper for publication.

As he wrote, though, he found himself fighting the urge to nod off. It had been a long day already—and it was going to be a long night as well, since they had to drive all the way back to Iacon and then make it to Mesothulas's lab by night; and how long would they be up after that? Prowl's optics dimmed. Even though he'd been able to sleep in a little bit longer than Mesothulas, he still felt like he'd hardly gotten any recharge. Between driving in to Kaon from their hotel—which, while technically _inside_ Kaon, was about equidistant from the core of Kaon and the core of Iacon—and then briefing Sentinel's team, fielding all the jabs about his new job, and getting in position for the raid… He was completely drained.

Maybe if Mesothulas got out soon and traffic was light, he could squeeze in a quick nap when they got to the lab. Mesothulas owed him a nap. He'd woken him this morning, talking about—what _had_ they talked about? Prowl had been half asleep; he barely remembered the exchange. Had it been important? He felt like it was...

Well, Mesothulas would remind him when he got out.

###

"And as I watched him rip the helpless helicopter apart, I was seized by a grotesque thought: what if he _was_ a diminished god? Such cruelty, such evil, could not possibly have come from a true Cybertronian, but rather from a sadistic divinity whose very _life_ was _death itself._ What if the cultists had just seen sooner what I, stubborn as I am with my science and my rationality, had refused to admit: that before us was _indeed_ Mortilus?"

Mesothulas paused for effect. The four officers crowded on the other side of the interrogation room table listened with bated vents.

"... But, then I remembered the surveillance footage Prowl got of him picking something out of his treads and smelling it, and—"

The officers' laughter drowned out the rest of the sentence.

###

"_Prowl?_"

Prowl sat bolt upright, dropping his datapad, startled back to full wakefulness. "Wh—Tumbler?!"

They stared blankly at each other. Of _all_ the faces Prowl could wake up to see, Tumbler's was—well, admittedly, historically speaking, one of the most probable—but among the least welcome.

But after an uncomfortably long moment, Prowl's rigorous self-training in basic social interaction scripts kicked in. "Hello," he said, politely.

"Uh. Hey, Prowl." Tumbler shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "You're uh... You're looking good. I mean!" He cringed, visor dimming. "Well! You look well! Like you're _doing_ good." He paused. “Minus the scraped paint.”

Prowl mentally willed the bench to retract into the wall and take him with it. "So do you." Did he? Prowl didn't know. Tumbler wasn't peeling paint or missing limbs, so he had to be well enough. He bent down and retrieved his datapad.

A voice high above said, "Sorry, uh...?"

Prowl almost dropped his datapad again. There was a second mech behind Tumbler, a shuttle so tall Tumbler was framed in the space between his shins.

Tumbler started. "Oh! Sorry. Sceptre, this is Prowl of Petrex; we used to work together. Prowl, this is Sceptre of Tetrahex; he's a coworker's brother."

Prowl looked up and could only see a mile of orange chest where a face should have been. "Nice to meet you," he said, politely.

"Charmed," Sceptre said, then muttered downward in Tumbler's general direction, "Do we need to stop here, or...?"

"Oh,” Tumbler said, “right, sorry." Prowl got his hopes up that they were going to move on, but then Tumbler said, "Go on without me. I'll just be a minute," and they sank back down.

"Thanks." Sceptre had to kneel at the front counter to sign in, and they had to transform back part of the wall to allow him past the lobby door.

"Wow. Hi," Tumbler said. "I didn't expect to—I mean—I didn't know you'd rejoined the Security Services. Or—is the ghost hunting only a part time thing, or—?"

"No, no. Mesothulas and I were called in to consult on a case." Prowl glanced toward the door back into HQ, mostly so he could look away from Tumbler. "I'm just waiting for him."

Tumbler startled Prowl with a laugh. "You two, consulting on a police case. Hey, remember the first time we saw him? When he visited our department? Remember what you called—?"

"I know. Shut up."

Tumbler laughed again. Prowl set his jaw, trying not to scowl; if he did, Tumbler would laugh at that, too. "I didn't know _you'd_ joined Security Services. I thought you didn't like Sentinel." The truth was probably closer to _utterly loathed,_ but you couldn't quite say _that_ much in the lobby of his headquarters.

As Prowl had hoped, Tumbler's laughter immediately stopped. "Yeah—no—I'm not. We're here to pick up Sceptre's brother. And when I called about him, they said they wanted me to help interrogate this cult leader and his ringleaders, so..."

"Oh. The New Society something something? That's the case we were helping on." Tumbler wasn't in interrogation. Prowl glanced at him. "Then you got the, uh, the mnemosurgery...?"

"What? Oh! Yeah. Got the job." Tumbler lifted a hand and waved his fingers; needles half-extended from the tips.

"Oh! Congratulations." Prowl forced a small smile. Politely. He almost immediately let it drop.

"Yeah, thanks— You don't have to— I've had the job for a while."

"I know, I know, but—I hadn't heard. When I didn't hear from you after I sent the letter of recommendation, I thought—"

"Oh, yeah, sorry, I didn't think to— I thought, uh, Ratchet would have mentioned..."

"We don't... we don't talk about you."

"Oh."

"Do you see Ratchet, or—?"

"Oh! Yeah. We work in the same hospital complex."

"Oh. Huh. Yeah, he hasn't—hasn't mentioned."

"Ah." An awkward silence threatened to descend; Tumbler beat it back. "Thank you, by the way, for that letter. It was, uh—they said it was compelling. Probably because it had the Prime's seal on it—"

"Yeah, usually—he usually only uses that stationery for official business. He gave me permission to take a pad."

"That was—that was smart. Thanks. That was... you didn't have to do all that for me."

"Yeah. Well. A position like that, I'd like to ensure that someone qualified gets it. And I've always said you, uh..."

"Right. Right."

The awkward silence, at last, descended upon them. Prowl stared at his datapad, and typed out a couple of words to complete the sentence he’d dozed off on.

Tumbler didn't make his polite excuses and leave, though, which was how Prowl thought most awkward silences were supposed to be resolved. _He_ couldn't be the one to leave; he was waiting for Mesothulas. He'd just have to fight off the awkward silence himself. "Ssso. How are you, uh... doing. I mean," he gestured vaguely, "I don't know how mnemosurgeons—do you get assigned partners, or...?"

What Prowl was trying to ask was _are you alone?_

When they'd been together, they'd only really had each other for company. For Prowl, it was because he hadn't _had_ friends before Tumbler decided he tolerated him; for Tumbler, though, Prowl didn't know. They both had friendly colleagues at work, but that was all they were—colleagues—and they didn't get invited out or over after work unless the whole department was invited together.

In the same way that one might feel like they're being watched even when no one is visible nearby, sometimes Prowl had felt like Tumbler resented him for the fact that they always went to their quarters alone each night. Prowl had often overheard their coworkers calling Tumbler "Unlucky," and Tumbler agreeing with a rueful laugh. Prowl didn't know what it was he'd done to drive away whatever friends Tumbler might have had before Prowl transferred to Iacon, but vague guilt plagued him at the thought that Tumbler might _still_ be alone. Prowl didn't want to be one of Tumbler's friends—but he wanted to make sure he had them.

"Oh!" Tumbler's tone audibly brightened, and Prowl relaxed. "Y—no, we're not assigned partners, but—I met someone. He's not a—but, we're in similar fields. We've got—you know—complementary skill sets. We work in the same hospital complex."

A few months after Prowl had first moved to Iacon, he'd marveled to Tumbler at how many people they ran into who were in business partnerships, even in neighborhoods without alt-mode exempt mechs. After Tumbler had stopped laughing, he'd explained to Prowl how Iaconians discuss their relationships, covering them up with euphemisms and ambiguous wording. _Complementary skill sets_ was an excuse used to justify cross-class relationships: _no, we're not in the same line of work, but we frequently collaborate because our functions overlap at the edges; my abilities indirectly contribute to his work and vice versa; so it's not so strange, you see, for us to be so close..._ The first time Prowl told someone he was seeing Mesothulas, what he'd actually said was _he got fully trained as a medic to support to his prior scientific position, and I'm planning to get certified as a forensic medical examiner._

"We're actually, uh, getting our work schedules synchronized, so it's easier for us to collaborate." Code for: they were planning to move in together.

"Oh! Oh, that's— Congratulations. Anyone I know?"

"No, I don't th—uh, his name's Pivot."

Prowl considered the name, and shook his head. "The name isn't familiar."

"Well that doesn't prove anything," Tumbler muttered. Prowl ignored him. "But, no. I doubt you've met."

It was Prowl's turn to speak again, but he was grasping and couldn’t pull out a context-appropriate polite comment, so he said, vaguely, "Hm."

"What about you and Mesothulas? He's still putting up with you?"

Tumbler meant it as a joke. Prowl didn't smile. "Still working together, yes."

"Good."

Already rebuffed twice, the awkward silence circled above them, like some vast, predatory bird.

Just before it could swoop down, Tumbler finally stepped toward the door at the back of the lobby. "I'd better go. Brains aren't going to needle themselves." He laughed awkwardly.

"Right. Of course."

"We should catch up sometime."

"Sure," Prowl said. He hoped that was one of those scripted polite statements that both parties were supposed to understand weren't true.

He waited until the door slid shut behind Tumbler to sigh in relief.

###

Sprawling on his back on the chair, his hands raised like he was strangling himself, Mesothulas cried, "I was sure that was the end of me! As Overlord's hands squeezed down on my shoulders, crushing my arms into scrap, my vision falling into static—at long last, Prowl appeared at the door, like Primus leading the charge that slew the true Mortilus. And he said—"

"Hold on," Bumper said. "This is when we came in to arrest Overlord, right? Your arms weren't crushed."

"Oh, weren't they?" Mesothulas sat up in his chair. "Hm. Then I must have been making everything up this whole interview. I suppose you'd better get the real story from Prowl."

The dozen officers listening to him groaned. Bumper threw his hands up. "Are we going to have to start over from the top?!"

"Oh, don't look at me like that. I'll send you a statement in a couple of days." He looked around at the assembled officers. "Am I free to go?"

When the interview room door swung open, it revealed a massive mech with a satellite dish attached to his forehead and a grin like a gash ripping his face open. A several-times-more-massive orange shuttle stood behind him. Mesothulas recognized dish head—he was one of the cultists, a repeat attendee. He always sat to the side near the front, watching enraptured. He cheered when people died.

He was probably not happy about having his god disproven. "... Ah?"

Dish head leaned closer, still grinning, until he was staring directly in Mesothulas's optics. "So." His voice was a conspiratorial hiss. "What happened after he crushed your arms?"

Mesothulas hesitated. Then grinned back.

###

The sun was so low it could shine into the covered driveway almost all the way to the lobby’s front door. For the last half hour, Prowl had been watching the line of sunshine crawl closer to the front doors, mentally counting down the seconds until the sunshine and doors would meet.

The back wall of the lobby folded open. Prowl glanced up. The massive shuttle (Scythe? Sickle?) was back, walking alongside a grounder—probably his brother—to whom the word "smaller" only applied when used in comparison to his much larger sibling.

"... swear on my spark, I thought _everyone_ there knew going in that they had a chance of dying!” the smaller brother said. "Sure, nobody signed a waiver, but that's—you know—just walking in the room reasonably counts as consent to be murdered, right? I thought it was all perfectly legal."

"_Sunder,_" the shuttle said exasperatedly, "why would they go if they thought they were going to die. Not everyone has a death wish like you."

"I don't think everyone has a death wish! But I think everyone who goes to a subterranean cave to see Mortilus in person does. Who goes to meet Mortilus without accepting the fact that they might get sacrificed?"

"People who think he's a fraud?" (Prowl's head jerked up. That was Mesothulas's voice.) "Personally, the first time I went, I thought he was going to be a con artist. I didn't expect him to be a con artist that kills people."

"There.” Scythe-or-whatever gestured at something Prowl couldn't see behind his massive leg. “You see?"

"Well," Sunder said sullenly. "Why did you go if you thought you were going to get conned."

"Oh, for the performance, of course! Who wouldn't want to see a mech strutting around pretending to be Mortilus? Doesn't that sound delightful?"

Sickle-or-something grumbled, "No." But Sunder's face lit up. "_Doesn't_ it? It's cool, right? Hey—Sceptre will tell you, I've been working on my Mortilus impression for years. Do you want to hear?"

"_Do_ I! We can compare—"

"Mesothulas," Prowl called.

Mesothulas's tiny head peeked out from behind a fortress of dark orange and red armor. "Prowl! I didn't see you." He extricated himself from the brothers and hurried over as Prowl stood; and for a moment, after such a long day, the sight of Mesothulas rushing up like there was nowhere in the universe he'd rather be than standing face-to-face with Prowl was almost enough to make Prowl do something effusively, audaciously sentimental. Like... touch his arm or something. He valiantly resisted the urge.

"This is my stop," Mesothulas told the brothers. "Do comm me up sometime, we should talk occult more." He turned back to Prowl. “I do apologize for the wait. It wasn't too much of a trial, was it?"

"Crossed paths with someone I'd rather not have. Could have used a rescue."

"So sorry!" Mesothulas cackled. "Who was it?"

Prowl already regretted broaching the topic—after getting stuck _talking with_ Tumbler, the last thing he wanted to do was talk _about_ him. "Tumbler," he said, shortly.

"Ah." To Prowl's relief, that was all Mesothulas said about it. "Well—I'm a bit late for a rescue, but we can certainly get going now. How are we looking?"

"Considering typical traffic between Kaon and Iacon at this hour, we should get to the lab just in time, if we leave right now."

"Then by all means." Mesothulas gestured grandly toward the door.

Before they could step outside, a voice behind them said, "If I could have a word with you two before you go."

Prowl's back automatically straightened. The two brothers paused to see if they were being spoken to, then looked away and hurried out the door. "Sentinel, sir." Prowl spun to face him.

"I've been asked to..." He grimaced, and let out a pained sigh. "Pass on an invitation to you both, on behalf of the Senate."

Prowl tried to decide whether this was a _we'd be honored_ situation or some sort of indictment. The grimace implied the latter, but you weren't usually _invited_ to indictments. "To?"

"There's going to be this..." Sentinel gestured dismissively, "fancy social function in a few weeks. Absolute rubbish, you know. Another distraction from the _real_ work our government needs to be doing, in my opinion—but, well, it's not _my_ function, now is it?"

"Ah." Prowl grimaced as well. "Like Dai Atlas's Crystal City memorial thing?"

"Ugh. Less _dancing_, I hope." Sentinel rolled his optics. "Anyway. Senator Shockwave would like to see you both in attendance. Apparently, you helped out one of his alumni and he's keen to meet you two."

"Oh? He funds the... Jhiaxian school, isn't it?"

"That's right."

"Probably Mirage," Mesothulas murmured. He was standing half behind Prowl, like Prowl was shielding him from Sentinel. "Didn't he have a diploma in his den?"

"Mhm, I remember seeing it." Specifically, he remembered wondering how in the hell a mech who apparently didn't even _read_ had graduated from such a prestigious school. Maybe it was only prestigious because of the name attached to the money behind it.

Prowl sighed. "We'd be honored, sir."

"Good mech." Sentinel glanced out the window. "You have a long drive back to Iacon, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

Sentinel nodded. "I'll send you the details later, then. That’s all.”

As soon as they'd been dismissed, Mesothulas hurried out the door, hopping down the stairs to the driveway. Prowl only got a step out the door before Sentinel's heavy hand came down on his shoulder.

Prowl froze. "Sir?"

"Prowl." Sentinel's voice was lower, and a shade less stern. "I want you to know that you've been missed in Security Services. You did stellar work. Unparalleled."

Prowl tried to thank Sentinel, but couldn't quite get his vocalizer to work. He nodded stiffly.

"If you ever find your... _unique_ new line of work unsatisfying..."

Prowl took a deep vent in and reset his vocalizer. "I'm still performing my original function, sir," he said. "Collecting clues, following evidence, unraveling mysteries..."

"Yes, yes, of course. No question that you're performing your function. But, perhaps not to your full potential," Sentinel said. "You'll always be welcome back at Security Services, if you get tired of chasing ghosts."

"I'll keep that in mind. Thank you, sir."

Sentinel let him go.

He followed Mesothulas outside.

###

"I finally understand why you get along with the Prime so well."

"Hm?" The comment shook Prowl out of his thoughts. Mesothulas had been humming cheerfully and weaving back and forth in his lane for the past fifteen minutes or so; as the sun set and Mesothulas’s biolights brightened, Prowl had found himself watching his taillight hypnotically sway back and forth. "Why?"

"I've never seen two bots so _utterly_ chagrined over having to go to a fancy party thrown by the most influential mechs on Cybertron."

"Oh." Prowl huffed. "They're not _that_ impressive."

"Not that—! How many have you been to?!"

"Uh... only as security."

"Still!"

"The luster wears off fast when you realize that you can't eat anything at the lavish tables of finger food."

Mesothulas cackled. "Then I promise I'll eat enough for both of us."

Prowl considered that. "... Mask off?"

"How else?"

"Can I watc—"

Mesothulas laughed so hard he almost drove off the road.

Prowl slowed down. "Sorry." He was trying not to laugh, too. "Do you need to stop?"

"No! No no." Mesothulas straightened out, mostly.

"Don't keep going if you can't drive straight."

"I'm fine. How long do we have to get to the lab?"

Prowl checked their speed, their route, and the time, and ran a quick calculation. "We should get there just in time."

And perhaps there wouldn’t be any fancy Senate party snack tables there; but Prowl could think of even more interesting ways he’d like to watch Mesothulas’s mouth move.

###

Before Mesothulas went into business as a paranormal investigator, he'd last worked at an extremely prestigious research lab in uptown Iacon, best known for inventing the expanding-and-contracting "webbing" that lined the insides of subspace pockets, making them practical as day-to-day storage devices and causing the production and installation of subspace pockets boom across Cybertron. The research lab's rosy reputation had somewhat waned in recent cycles, without any spectacular new discoveries to keep them at the forefront of the public's mind; but then, Mesothulas hadn't worked there in recent cycles, either.

That wasn't the lab they were going to.

With rare exceptions, when Prowl and Mesothulas talked about Mesothulas's "old lab," they were talking about only one location: a spectacular array of scavenged, stolen, and homemade lab equipment for a dozen different scientific disciplines, contained beneath what remained of the roof of a dilapidated building in an abandoned warehouse district on the outskirts of Iacon. Despite the partially collapsed roof, the walls were high enough that three shuttles would have to stand on each other's shoulders to see in the hole. All the doors were buried from the inside with rubble and from the outside with a rising tide of sandy dirt stirred up by the frequent torrential storms in the warehouse district. The only two ways in or out were the high hole in the roof, and a door into the basement which connected to a sewage tunnel that kept the half-roofed building drained.

The basement door slammed open.

Prowl and Mesothulas tumbled through, arms around each other. They attempted to press up against a wall, lost their balance, collapsed to the floor with Prowl on top, and wordlessly decided that was adequate. Mesothulas's mask had been abandoned somewhere halfway up the basement stairs.

Prowl pulled back from the fanglike biting of Mesothulas’s kiss long enough to tug his hands free from under Mesothulas's back, so he could rest them on Mesothulas's upper tires instead. He dug the edges of his fingers into the gaps between his treads, only to feel the rubber stretching and thinning, and the prickle against his fingertips of optical fibers sprouting from newly-revealed pinprick holes.

Prowl sat back, straddling Mesothulas's waist. In the light of the moonless starry sky and his own biolights, he watched as the armor on Mesothulas's chest shifted, shrank, vanished, emerged, and expanded. He could feel plates on Mesothulas's waist flexing and sliding between his thighs, corners turning into curves.

Prowl smiled. “What did I say? Just in time."

A golden visor slid down over Mesothulas's optics. "I never doubted you for a second, my dear." He reached up, cupping Prowl's face in his hands; Prowl closed his optics and focused on the touch as Mesothulas's fingers stretched, the internal struts and wires exposed around the edges of the too-short surface plating, and then twined together.

He pulled Prowl down into another kiss, and then wrapped around him. And around him, and around him, and around him, and around him.


	4. Case 3, Part 1: Starscream and the Poltergeist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the best chapter because, as you can see, it has Starscream in it.
> 
> Not a lot of commentary on this one! We're getting into the meat of the story now. :)

Prowl had been staring at the same report for the last twenty minutes without seeing it, when he heard someone say Mesothulas's name. He flinched, face heating in embarrassment, like someone had leaned over his shoulder and caught him reading a love letter on his work computer; for a split second, he was absolutely sure someone had figured out why he wasn't focused on his work.

It took him a moment to realize nobody had said anything to him—he’d overheard someone else's conversation—and another moment after that to realize that no one had even said "Mesothulas." He'd heard "Spindleback." Which was, of course, not Mesothulas. Prowl only associated the name with him because that was the case he'd consulted on when Prowl had first learned about him.

He listened to the conversation outside his office.

"I thought that thing only appeared in Iacon."

"It _did_—I mean, it _used_ to—there's a reason it's called the '_Iaconian_ Spindleback'—"

"So how come everyone thinks this is the same thing?"

"Well, just—just read the descriptions. If you compare them, they're exactly the same."

"What, 'tall, dark, and hairy'? That doesn't prove anything."

"No, come on—"

Sentinel's voice cut in on the conversation. "I don't care _what_ this creeptoid is—"

"It's—it's 'cryptid,' sir."

"_Whatever_. What I _care_ about is the fact that my city went from zero to mass hysteria in _one night_ over imagined sightings of this thing, and I want to know what lunatic pranksters are behind it! So if you two would stop running a compare and contrast between this thing and some miscreants in an entirely different city, and instead tell me who you intend to go _find_ it..."

As they'd been speaking, Prowl had done a search and skimmed over the reported "Spindleback" sightings on file. Well—hell. Since returning from the bioelectromagnetics conference, he'd hardly been able to focus on his work. He was too distracted by—by Mesothulas, for one—but more than that, by one of the things he'd discussed with Mesothulas: all the little injustices and cruelties he had to watch go by but had no idea how to address. (Part of him regretted voicing his concerns out loud—it had made them all the more real. He _definitely_ regretted who he'd voiced them _to._) Maybe getting out of the office on a somewhat different case would be good for him.

He sighed quietly, stood, and leaned out of his office door. "Sir. If you're looking for someone to take the case, I would like to volunteer."

Sentinel and the two officers in the hall stared at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"I was in Iacon when the Spindleback sightings started. If there are sightings being reported in Kaon now, I'd like to finally get to the bottom of it."

Sentinel laughed in surprise. "Prowl! Surely _you_ don't believe that something as—as _preposterous_ as this 'Spindleback' creature is real?"

"Absolutely not, sir," Prowl said. "Would you trust someone who _was_ swept up in the hysteria to track down a hoaxer?" (The two officers frowned sourly—they were probably among the aforementioned swept up in hysteria.) “Over ninety-nine percent probability, there's no real creature that can be accurately called a ‘Spindleback’—but there is _something_ that people are consistently misidentifying as one. Whatever and whoever it is, it needs to be identified."

Sentinel nodded. "Yes, that's true," he said. "But—Prowl, surely you're not so bored that this is the best case you can turn your considerable investigative capabilities to?"

Prowl froze for a moment, fighting not to get distracted by the high praise. "I—would like the opportunity to expand my repertoire of investigative abilities."

"Hm. Very well. Whatever's out there is undoubtedly some freak that needs to be eliminated, and there's no one else I'd trust to handle the case as competently as you."

Prowl's jaw dropped. "Some freak that needs to be—? Sir, you do realize that whatever the Spindleback is, there's—there's a strong possibility that it's a person? Possibly a beastformer?"

"A beastformer that's terrorizing my citizens. I know what I said."

Prowl stared at him, trying to work out the right words to say to make Sentinel understand how utterly, unforgivably _wrong_ that entire sentiment was—without making Sentinel refuse to ever listen to anything Prowl said again.

Instead, he nodded deeply. "Thank you for the assignment, sir. I'll get to work."

For a moment, he hated himself. But he hated his job more.

###

The first discovery Prowl made about the Iaconian Spindleback was that it adhered to an extremely rigid schedule. Slightly more than every three and a half months, there was a wave of sightings in a single night, and then nothing. Sometimes it would skip its scheduled appearance, and it would be 7 months rather than 3.5 between sightings, but it never appeared when it shouldn't. Any purported Spindleback sightings outside of its scheduled nights were solo complaints rather than part of a wave of sightings, frequently wildly divergent from usual Spindleback descriptions, frequently easily proven to be something else entirely, and always by people who insistently referred to it by name—meaning they already knew about the Spindleback, and they _wanted_ to be able to say they'd seen it. Having removed the true believers who were willfully misidentifying fliers with back-mounted rotors, it was obvious that all the genuine Spindleback sightings fit the schedule.

And, what was more, from Prowl's research into the online cryptid-hunting community, it seemed that no one besides him had identified the schedule. If he was the only one aware of the schedule, that meant no copycats were out playing Spindleback on the “correct” nights and no believers were particularly alert on those nights for something they could call a sighting.

Nobody knew the Spindleback's schedule but Prowl and the Spindleback itself.

Its appearance in Kaon fit the schedule: coincidentally, just one night after the bioelectromagnetics conference. (Prowl wondered if the great paranormal debunker had heard—and immediately regretted thinking about him.) It hadn't been spotted in Iacon the night it had been in Kaon. Most likely, there was only one of them.

Collecting testimonies, interviewing witnesses, and handling some regular cases in between burned up most of the time until the next sighting. By the time Prowl was confident of when it would appear again, it turned out he only had to wait a few days for the correct night. And right on schedule, the reports rolled in. This time, again from Iacon.

At that point, Sentinel would have been content to drop the case. If it wasn't in Kaon, it wasn't the Kaon-based Security Services' priority. They had global jurisdiction for what Sentinel considered cases that threatened the general Cybertronian populace, but this was not that.

Prowl argued it was. During his investigation into the Spindleback, he'd uncovered that it was behind a slew of crimes: trespassing, property damage, theft... there were even a few reported assaults. Someone, knowing few law enforcement officers would take reports of a monster attack seriously, was using a spooky costume to get away with breaking the law. Even _Prowl_ hadn't initially believed the reports when he was in Iacon. He wasn't going to make that mistake again.

So, the next time the Spindleback was set to appear, Prowl was in Iacon.

###

He'd hoped that returning to the Iaconian Mechaforensics Division would feel like a homecoming—like a return to the last place where he'd felt like he and his colleagues were doing good rather than like he was trying to stop his colleagues from doing bad.

It didn't feel like a homecoming.

One small mercy: he didn't cross paths with Tumbler, and nobody mentioned him to Prowl. He retreated into his temporary office and hoped it stayed that way. He had work to do. With luck, he'd be arresting a cryptid tonight.

The Spindleback was described at various sizes; if Prowl took out the obvious wild exaggerations and stuck only to those witnesses who'd been able to compare its size to something concrete, then its height ranged from half the height of a minibot to head and shoulders above a shuttle—which sounded like rubbish to Prowl. But its shape remained consistent: thin, hunched, broad-shouldered. Most importantly, every single description of it agreed that it was covered with what most reports called its "spindles," crooked pipes extending out of its back that moved on their own and were covered in a coat of needles or short wires. They'd been dubbed "spindles" because the Spindleback also supposedly excreted some sort of thread or thin wires. The eager cryptid hunters of Iacon hypothesized that the creature actually spun its wires on its spindles—hence the name. It was said to have anywhere from five to two dozen spindles.

It was also said to sometimes collapse to the floor and writhe across it unnaturally, dragged grotesquely along by its spindles. That sounded to Prowl like the spindles were _alt-mode kibble_. Some kind of beastformer legs, nothing more grotesque than that. Or, hell, it could just as easily be a car that strapped a bunch of fake tentacles to their back that dragged on the ground behind them as they drove.

It was generally found around warehouses, industrial sites, scientific facilities—cryptid hunters theorized that it was the result of an experiment gone wrong or an industrial accident, but Prowl considered it more likely it was using its disguise to steal from these facilities.

He’d selected a handful of facilities in Iacon that hadn't had Spindleback sightings yet but fit the pattern, told security to be on heightened alert for anything unusual that night, and waited for a call.

Lo and behold, not long after nightfall: a comm from a facility that produced industrial chemicals. The night guard had spotted the silhouette of something dark with a whole lot of extra limbs writhing up a wall and into a ventilation shaft that should have been far too small for it.

"Six minutes, forty seconds," Prowl said into the comm.

"What?"

"Our ETA." He hung up and nodded to the three mechs who'd been assigned to him.

The chase was on.

###

"In there," the janitor said quietly. While Prowl and his team had been speaking with the night guard about how he’d seen the Spindleback sneak inside, the guard had received a comm from the janitor, saying he’d trapped a strange intruder in a room. "Scraping and thumping. I locked the only door behind me when I left and it hasn't been out of my sight. Nothing should be in there."

"Does the room have a ventilation shaft?"

The janitor gave Prowl a surprised look. "Of course. Why wouldn't it?"

"I—" That was a good point. He looked at the other officers. "Well, we know how it's getting around."

One asked, "How do we stop it from escaping?"

Prowl turned to the janitor. "Is there a way to remotely seal the vents?"

The janitor nodded. "We've got an emergency lockdown on our air circulation system in case of chemical spills."

"Good. Give us your key to that room. We'll go in the second the vents are sealed."

"Yessir." The janitor handed Prowl a card and hurried over to an orange handle on the wall beneath a plastic case.

The officers surrounded the door, Prowl holding the card over the lock. He watched the nearest vent until, with a snap, the flaps sealed shut. "On the count of thr—"

Sirens blared and yellow lights flashed. Prowl shuddered, optics squeezing shut. Oh, Primus. Of course lockdown meant an alarm. He should have expected that. So much for surprising the Spindleback.

He opened his optics, smacked the key over the lock, shouted, "Go!" and charged in first.

The room was a corridor of chemical tanks, a couple of which were currently draining into smaller canisters. One yellow flash illuminated a figure at the far end of the room: shadowy and furry, tall yet hunched, weighted down with crooked pipes. All four officers stumbled to a stop. Prowl could see its biolights, small green pinpricks on the far side of the room. In the next flash it was gone.

"Adaptus save us—"

"It wasn't mechanical. Did you see that fur? It wasn't mechanical!"

"It had, god, twenty spindles on its back—"

"Ten," Prowl said.

"There were at _least_ a dozen—"

"Ten," Prowl snapped. "Or eight and two arms. Come on!" Into the dark, he yelled, "Security Services! Come out with your h—hands...?" He reset his vocalizer. "With your hands, or—or equivalent anatomy up!"

Very intimidating.

They moved down the room in a pack, the two on the outside turning their headlights along the walls to peer into the gaps between chemical tanks. Prowl kept squinting into the darkness above, unable to point his headlights up there and so searching the shadows by the painful flashes of the emergency lights; if this thing could climb walls to get into vents, it could be on any surface of the room.

But they reached the far end, and found nothing—except a torn up floor with an open drain, leading down.

They stared down at the hole in dismay. "Why the hell is there a drain in the middle of a building?" one of the officers muttered.

Prowl glanced up, and pointed at a shower head. "For emergency chemical spills." Then he looked back down at the hole. He'd seen the shoulder span on that thing; he'd been able to visibly measure its width. It was physically impossible for that shoulder span to fit in the diameter of hole ripped in the floor.

Well—maybe it'd transformed. "It's down in the sewers now," Prowl said. "It's a good thing I downloaded a full map of Iacon's sewer lines."

The other three officers stared at him. He wasn't sure if their expressions were impressed or alarmed.

He made the deliberate choice to believe they were impressed. "I'm going after it."

"Prowl, wait—"

It wasn't until he was down a very long pipe and had landed with a painful crash in a tunnel that it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, he'd jumped down without a plan because he _really_ wanted to get away from those flashing lights, and perhaps should not have done that.

He looked up. "Hello?" No one was following him.

Well. He was down here without backup now. His options were stay put doing nothing and risk getting ambushed by a burglar with giant pipes hanging out of his back, or attempt to make an arrest and risk getting ambushed by a burglar with giant pipes hanging out of his back. The latter, at least, seemed productive.

As he jogged through the sewers, he hoped Sentinel would have the decency to forbid any of those hokey "true paranormal" documentary series from doing a special on Prowl's death.

He heard a clang in the distance, followed by a shuffling sound. He chased after it.

Comm signals were weak this far underground. Every time he got a signal, he sent a location ping to his officers. None of them were mechs he'd known when he'd worked in Iacon, and he had no idea how competent they were; but if they were the _least_ bit useful, they'd be calling for backup and searching the sewers.

Every once in a while he glimpsed some shape lurking at the far end of a tunnel or vanishing around a corner—mostly black, but sometimes catching Prowl's headlights in colors of half-dried energon and pallid green—sometimes bipedal, sometimes curled into some unknown alt-mode and skittering along walls on its spindles—sometimes twice Prowl's height, sometimes half his height—which was _impossible_. Mechs just don't grow and shrink like that. That was science fiction. It was impossible. Had the flashing lights messed up the calibration of Prowl's optics? Had the shrill sirens given him brain damage in the exact area he needed to measure distances?

Don't be ridiculous. The darkness down here probably made it hard to accurately gauge depth; he couldn't tell how far away the Spindleback was if he couldn't see clearly.

That was all.

He followed the Spindleback half by sight and sound, half by checking his map and predicting that the Spindleback knew the sewers well enough to avoid making turns that would lead it into a quick dead end. But even though Prowl tried to gain ground on the broad flat stretches where he could transform and drive, within ten minutes, he'd lost its trail completely.

Trying to retrace where he'd seen it last, he noticed a panel in one wall that had been pried out then hastily pulled back in place. Peeking behind it, he found a pipe tall enough for a car to walk through—one that wasn't in his sewer maps.

It had a marginally higher probability of containing the Spindleback than any other path. So as long as he was lost…

He descended into the ancient pipe.

It was damp, cold, and corroded. He found himself grateful—more grateful than usual—that he couldn't smell. When he'd first been built, the casual scents of his surroundings had been intolerable, overwhelming all his other senses and taking up most of his processing power to wade through, like trying to track the trajectories of a million pieces of confetti at once without having the luxury of closing his eyes to pause the onslaught. So he'd had his olfactory sensors fried. He usually never thought about it, except in situations like this, when he thought that his surroundings probably really, really stank.

He grimaced every time he stepped in semisolid sludge. He had to keep his doors folded straight back for fear of scraping them on the rusty walls. But even though sewage probably hadn't flowed so much as moldered in this pipe for millennia, it had been recently used—he could see a trail swept free of debris, and it was easy to follow the trail whenever the path split. Following it gave him time to attempt to work out exactly what the hell the Spindleback _was_.

It was a thief, _that_ was certain. And it was almost certainly a Cybertronian of some kind—Prowl had undeniably seen it using its "spindles" like legs, which meant it could transform. So, what _nature_ of Cybertronian? Aside from its broad chest and shoulders, its lower torso and arms and legs were far too—well—too _spindly_ to allow for a normal body plan, or for this alt-mode to be a costume on top of another body. A beastformer with an alt Prowl had never seen before? Or was it an _actual_ sewer-dwelling mutation? Some sort of escaped experiment? Or—

No. Stop. This was ludicrous. Prowl refused to entertain the wild conspiracy theories of cryptid hunters. Even if they were seeming _increasingly_ plausible—

No. _Nothing_ about them seemed plausible. One strange tale being true did not automatically beget another strange tale being true. All Prowl could say for sure was—

—was that the Spindleback was something _real_.

The realization was terrifying—but, unexpectedly, somehow thrilling, too.

There was something _real_ out there. Something in the realm of the unknown, the supernatural, the paranormal, that could be _proven_ and _witnessed_, not simply swallowed like a pill and washed down with a glass of willfully blind faith.

He had never _wanted_ to find such a thing. Until now he hadn't believed that it _was_ possible to find such a thing: something that had been considered paranormal, out walking amongst the normal. On some level, he supposed, he had always believed that anything others believed without proof was automatically imaginary. That was all that existed: the proven things, and the imaginary things. He had never quite accounted for the possibility of the real-but-unproven.

But here he was.

He remembered drunkenly asking Mesothulas whether there were true things out there, and Mesothulas assuring him that there were; and then he tried not to remember.

The path eventually tilted up. Prowl's internal GPS wasn't working out here either, but he knew how long his strides were, and he'd tracked the angles of his turns well enough to know what directions he'd been heading; and by his reckoning, he should be on the outskirts of Iacon by now, in an all-but-desolate warehouse district. Long ago, when Iacon had been a spaceport, goods coming and going had been stored here; but between the decline in interstellar trade, the consolidation of political power in Iacon and relocation of major spaceports to places like Staniz, and the increase in devastating thunderstorms over the warehouse district due to the regional climate change caused by the urbanization, the district had gradually been all but abandoned. If the Spindleback didn't mind getting rained on or risking a little electrocution, the warehouse district was a fine hideout.

The pipe ended in a long, near-barren basement, with drains near the ceiling—probably to allow rainwater into the sewers. A small staircase led up to a locked door; it only took a couple of kicks for Prowl to break it in and tumble out into a warehouse. He gaped around at the astounding breadth of equipment packed into the warehouse—much of which he recognized from previous Spindleback police reports, and some of which he'd been begging Sentinel to let him buy for the forensics lab for _years_. Prowl could think of nothing to call this place _but_ a lab, even if the word seemed to woefully undersell what he was looking at. It was more like ten entirely different labs packed together. He spotted some kind of half-finished machine scattered across a table. His fuel tank flipped. He looked away.

And in the middle of it all, crouched defensively, the waxing light of Luna Two shining on its black and purple coat of wires, was the Spindleback itself.

It was pointing eight guns at him.

Prowl jerked back, drawing and raising his own gun. Script, script— "Security Services!" he barked. "You're under arrest for breaking into a—"

"Prowl, wait, no, please—"

Prowl froze, mouth still half open. "How...?"

"I..." The Spindleback trailed off, unable to continue.

He didn't have to. Prowl's gaze drifted back over to the half-finished machine. He'd spent an entire drunken afternoon painstakingly correcting scrawled doodles into sharp lines and smooth curves to make a useable blueprint; he'd recognize his and Mesothulas's upgraded spark scanner anywhere. Even when he didn't want to.

Prowl looked back at the monster and asked hoarsely, "_Mesothulas?_"

The Spindleback looked away—the moonlight caught on his face, and Prowl stared at his strange vertical mouth and the clawlike fangs that surrounded the opening. The fangs moved hypnotically when he spoke. "Excellent detective work, officer." His voice was so soft.

It was the softness, more than anything else, that snapped Prowl out of his shock and back into his default mode. He only barely managed to stow his gun without dropping it as he strode up to Mesothulas. Mesothulas shrank back—he _literally, physically shrank_—and Prowl stopped, holding his hands up placatingly. "What happened?" he demanded. "Who did this to you?"

"N-nothing happened. Nobod—I did this to myself," Mesothulas said. (Prowl could barely look away from his mouth, trying to work out the patterns in his fangs' motion like he was learning to lipread.) "You recall, when we discussed the concept of everyone being their own god, each mech having their own purpose—Prowl, this, this is the realization of _my_ purpose. The calling in my spark made manifest."

The more he spoke, the more confident he became. He grew again, straightening up, until Prowl barely came up to his shoulders. The guns folded away into the tips of his spindles, and the spindles uncurled and spread, fanning out around him, like the sunbeams depicted shining out from around gods' chests in art to represent the power of their sparks.

Laying a long, bristly hand across his chest, he said, "In this form—my name is Tarantulas."

#####

Case 3, Part 1: Starscream and the Poltergeist

###

The sun was high enough to tilt a few sunbeams through the hole in the roof of the warehouse lab, but still not nearly high enough for the sunbeams to reach the floor below; and Prowl had no interest in waking up or moving any time soon.

And yet here he was, half awake, and quite dissatisfied with it. Why, exactly, was he half awake?

Tarantulas was Mesothulas again—and therefore, proportioned far less comfortably to sprawl all over. Prowl remained sprawled anyway. He wasn't _quite_ so uncomfortable that he had to move; and anyway, with his head on Mesothulas's tire like this, he was in the perfect position to look at Mesothulas's sleeping, unmasked face. He sleepily dragged his hand from Mesothulas's chest to his mouth, teasing his penultimate pair of mandibles with a fingertip. Without stirring, Mesothulas nipped at the edge of Prowl's finger.

Prowl's optics dimmed and shut off.

His comm rang in his head again, and he flinched. Oh _right_. That was why he woke up. Without turning on his optics, he answered the call. "Mmwhat?"

"You sound asleep. Are you asleep?" Jazz asked. "Do you know what time it is? Is this what being self-employed is like?"

"No, no, just slept bad." He scooted in, moving his head from Mesothulas's tire to rest against his jaw. "The uh—recharge slab was malfunctioning. Couldn't plug in. What's up?"

"You're heavy," Mesothulas mumbled into Prowl's forehead. "Stop sprawling on me."

Prowl rolled onto his back, flopping to the dusty ground.

"I'm calling with news from Security Services. One of the bots arrested at Overlord's little party yesterday had an interesting story when we interviewed him: said he was checking out the New Society of the Resurrected Death hoping to talk to Mortilus, God of Death, about dealing with a little ghost problem he and his roommates are having."

"Oh _really_." Prowl tried to turn his optics back on, decided that was overly ambitious, and sat up instead. "And I suppose you told him about us."

"He was more than thrilled to get hooked up with some _actual_ paranormal investigators." Smugly, Jazz said, "So how about that? When I promised to get you some jobs, you didn't think it was gonna be that fast, did you?"

There was a reason Jazz was one of the only people in Security Services that Prowl still liked talking to.

"We owe you one." Prowl finally turned an optic on and patted Mesothulas's chest until he grumbled and sat up.

"Pick up the bill next time we hang out and we'll call it square."

"Deal."

Mesothulas's arm snaked around Prowl's neck as he sat up. Prowl muted his end of the comm line long enough to give Mesothulas a quick kiss and whisper, "Got a haunting."

"_Now_? All our stuff's in the apartment…”

As Mesothulas felt around with his free hand for his discarded mask, Prowl unmuted the comm. "So tell us about the client."

###

It was late afternoon by the time they'd made it back to their apartment, patched up the paint they’d damaged spelunking down to Overlord’s cult last night, collected their supplies, and headed to their new client's address.

Within sight of the Jhiaxian Academy of Advanced Technology, it was the cheapest apartment building in a neighborhood of moderately expensive apartments—the kind of place that looked respectable enough on the outside, but on the inside probably had rooms with five bots hoping their jury-rigged bunked recharge slabs didn't short out and start a fire. Mesothulas was well acquainted with the sort of place. Every major school that accepted students that weren't strictly part of that school's function had one or two such dwellings nearby, for the students that couldn't be housed on school grounds—and Mesothulas was both highly educated and outside of _any_ school's function.

This one probably didn't have an unauthorized chemistry lab set up in a communal wash rack, though. That sort of thing tended only to happen in the apartments where Mesothulas lived.

The front door was only locked with a numpad and a ten-digit password, which their client had given Jazz to give to them. Conspicuous cameras pointed at the door and monitored the lobby. Mesothulas wondered if they worked. Probably not.

He hummed to himself all the way up the stairs—he couldn't help it; he was always in a good mood after a night where he got to be himself—but as they reached their client's floor, Mesothulas whispered, "I'm doing the talking this time. Remember how Mirage reacted when you interjected."

"I can't be _completely_ silent. But I'll let you take the lead," Prowl said.

Mesothulas gave him an exasperated look.

"It would seem weird if I didn't say _anything_. Wouldn't it?"

Mesothulas wondered if Prowl would agree not to talk at all if he said, no, it wouldn't be weird at all. Not because he _wanted_ Prowl to be silent—quite the opposite, even at risk of torquing a few clients—but out of a scientific curiosity about just how blindly Prowl trusted his judgment in social matters.

During Mesothulas’s brief dip into psychology, he’d learned that cold constructed bots built with the Tactical Augmentation Routine OS (or Talent Augmentation Routine OS; the literature argued viciously about which was the more accurate term) rather than more common brain module operating systems frequently had highly increased observational abilities in just about every field _except_ socialization, and that certainly fit Prowl to a T—but sometimes Mesothulas wondered whether Prowl’s far-too-keen knowledge of his social disadvantages led to him second-guessing himself even when he _had_ accurately read a situation.

But, he wasn’t going to shake what little faith Prowl had in his own social abilities just to see how much he trusted Mesothulas’s judgment over his own. If Mesothulas ever wanted to play mind games like that, he’d find a mech he liked less than Prowl for them. ”Just be careful not to get too scientific on them."

Mesothulas double-checked the door number, and knocked. It only opened a crack, a chain holding it in place—but it was enough for Mesothulas to see the cockpit and wings of the bot inside. One of those easily-identifiable army-builder flight frames. (No, he shouldn't think of them as "army-builders." It was hard to break the habit.) Not _Prowl's_ build, but nearly as common.

"Hello," Mesothulas said cheerily. "We're looking for a Starscream of Vos. Is this his apartment?"

The flier's distrustful look deepened. "Depends," he said. "What do you want him for?"

"Uh—" _Starscream_ was the one that wanted _them_. Mesothulas looked at Prowl, then back at the flier. "... Ghost hunting?"

He looked them up and down again. "All right. Come in."

The door shut, unlocked, and swung wide again. The flier who let them in gave them a charming, but cold, smile. "Sorry about that. I've had a wild day—cults and cops, I'm sure you heard all about it."

"_Heard_ about it? I happened to _see_ it." Mesothulas recognized the flier now, seeing his whole body—he was the flier that Shockwave had been speaking to yesterday before Mesothulas came up. "I take it _you're_ Starscream, then?"

"Yes. Were you at—?" He glanced between the two of them, his gaze settled on Prowl, his optics brightened, and he looked back at Mesothulas with new recognition. His cold smile became absolutely frigid. "Ah."

Ah. Yes. Right. He _would_ have seen Prowl bursting into the room and declaring everyone was under arrest—and then seen Overlord announce that Mesothulas was with him. Well. This was... not the best start they'd had with a client.

But Starscream nevertheless stepped back, inviting them into the room with a sweeping gesture that simultaneously took in the other two fliers in the room, one sitting and one leaning against a wall, identical to him except in paint. "But, yes. I'm Starscream. These two idiots are Thundercracker and Skywarp."

"_Really?_" Skywarp grumbled. "Do you have to introduce us to people as idiots? Is that necessary? _You_ asked to live with _us_."

With great pomp and dignity, Starscream turned back to Mesothulas and Prowl and said, "I'm Starscream, and these two unparalleled geniuses, these minds too bright even for the Jhiaxian Academy, these greatest thinkers on Cybertron today, are the incomparable Thundercracker and Skywarp."

Skywarp scowled. Thundercracker shrugged apathetically. "Yeah, I can live with that."

"So," Prowl said, "to make sure I've got everyone straight—which of you were arrested, exactly?" An alarmed jolt shot up Mesothulas's spinal strut. Prowl. Prowl, _please_.

Starscream stood straighter. "That's a very personal question, isn't it."

Thundercracker and Skywarp both pointed at Starscream.

"Good, good. Which means you're the one that's been experiencing this ghost," Mesothulas said quickly. "Then, while Prowl is examining the apartment, I'll be interviewing you about your experiences. We can do it in private or not, whichever you prefer."

Starscream looked warily at Prowl, but his attention snapped back to his roommates when Thundercracker said, "Hey! Why just him? He's not the only one that's been experiencing weird stuff."

"Yeah, we've been haunted as hell," Skywarp said.

Starscream stared at them. "You _have_?" They nodded in confirmation.

"All right." Mesothulas took a seat in the one unoccupied chair. "Welcome to the interview. So Prowl can get started—are there any particular hot spots of activity we should know about?" He smiled. "Or cold spots, as the case may be? Hyeh."

None of the fliers laughed.

(But Mesothulas heard Prowl huff quietly.)

"I've noticed it more in the recharge room. But it mainly happens at night, so maybe I only notice it in there because that’s where I'm sleeping," Skywarp said, squeezing onto Thundercracker’s seat.

Thundercracker shook his head. "I go into the living room sometimes when I get insomnia. It's all over the apartment."

Starscream was staring at them both with naked surprise. But, slowly, he nodded. "Yeah," he said quietly. "It's... impossible to escape."

"I'll start with the recharge room." Prowl unstrapped and set down their supplies, and rummaged through them for the thermometer and laser velocimeter.

Mesothulas glanced around the room while he waited for Prowl to get his equipment and move on. The apartment was a cramped little space for three. Mesothulas doubted there was even a wash rack in here. Square-shelved bookcases around the perimeter of the room were stuffed with weapons (with prominent orange licenses stuck on the sides), household appliances, cleaning and detailing supplies, the extracted contents of several first aid kits, and enough stray datapads—both rewritable and read-only—to fill in all the gaps and spill out on the floor. It honestly didn't look much worse than some of the apartments Mesothulas had lived in during his off-and-on schooling. (Hell, he might _still_ live in an apartment like that if not for Prowl.)

Besides the bookcases, there were only three pieces of furniture in the small room: a low table completely covered in mostly-empty energon cubes and cans, what appeared to be a shuttle-sized armchair sawed down into a couch just big enough for two of the fliers, and the second mismatched chair that Mesothulas had claimed, which left Starscream leaning against a bookcase with his arms crossed.

"So." Mesothulas pulled out his datapad, and nudged away a couple of empty cubes on the table near his knees so he could cross his legs without bumping them. "What phenomena have you been experiencing, precisely?"

###

And Prowl had thought the living room was a mess. He had to pick his way over crumpled cans and discarded soldering tools just to check the temperature and air currents. A vacuum stood sad and neglected in the corner, its handle used to hold several cheap-looking fake crowns. Prowl felt awful just _being_ in this room. He found himself suddenly grateful for the fact that, as haphazard as Mesothulas's organization system was, at least he didn't leave trash around.

Only one recharge slab, with a raised pallet on the floor beside it and a couple of loosely coiled cables left at the head of the slab. It didn't look like they'd modified the berth so they could all plug in at once; which meant they had to be sleeping daisy chained together, with whoever didn't fit on the slab sleeping on the pallet next to it. That was _such_ a health code violation. They were lucky they didn't set themselves on fire like that. He knelt to check the underside of the berth to see if any of the wires had scorch marks. It probably wasn't relevant to the case, but he felt he should tell the fliers if their berth was in imminent danger of exploding.

But it _might_ be relevant. Prowl would have to look up if there were any side effects to daisy chaining a recharge slab. Maybe whoever was on the end was constantly sleep-deprived; that could account for a _lot_ of inexplicable observations...

... Being in this room really _did_ feel awful. Prowl sat back, looking around the room at the clutter and rubbish. Maybe it was claustrophobia from the mess crowding in on him. Or maybe some wild animal had gotten into the room—he felt vaguely like he was being watched. He'd investigated murder scenes that felt a lot like this room.

What was a _feeling_ worth. Could he quantify it? No. He didn't like the mess. That was all.

And if it _wasn't_ the mess—there was some rational explanation. There were sound frequencies outside the normal range of Cybertronian hearing that, when felt, could automatically trigger a wave of dread. It was undoubtedly something like that. Some normal but as yet unmeasured part of the environment.

So he'd better finish taking his measurements and return to Mesothulas to compare notes.

As quickly as possible.

###

Mesothulas read over the massive list of things that, according to Thundercracker and Skywarp, had been happening in the apartment. Things seen floating, things disappearing without explanation, sometimes things breaking when no one was in the room with them; cold spots, spots that caused audial and visual static, weird glowing lights around hallway corners that disappeared before they could find the source; waking up in the middle of the night with weird senses of dread, or waking up with the panicked feeling of being trapped in a dying body…

Any one of those things could be accounted for by a simple explanation: objects breaking or disappearing due to the general haphazard clutter of the apartment, cold spots caused by poor air conditioning circulation, night terrors from basic student anxiety. But Mesothulas couldn't think of one single cause that would easily explain _all_ of them. _Maybe_ if they had some kind of magnets near their heads at night that caused hallucinations—but the sheer breadth of things they'd seen, the length of time they'd been seeing them without sustaining actual brain damage, the fact that they sometimes saw things outside their rooms or during the day or before going to bed...

Well, it was early yet. Perhaps there _were_ multiple factors contributing to this “haunting.” Anyway, he hadn't seen what Prowl had found yet.

Mesothulas turned to Starscream. "You haven't said very much. Has what you’ve seen lined up with your roommates' experiences?"

Starscream jolted upright, uncrossing his arms. "Er— Right. Yes. Almost identical. Sorry, I was mostly listening. It's just—" he glared daggers at the other two fliers, "they never told _me_ any of this."

Skywarp flung his hands up. "Whenever we tried, you brushed it off!"

"Yeah," Thundercracker said, his chin propped in his hand. "We thought either you didn't notice it or thought we were overreacting."

Starscream stared between them for a moment; then shrank back, crossing his arms and leaning on the bookcase again. "I... thought it was only happening to me," he mumbled. "I didn't want to worry you."

They both burst out in laughter. Snorting, Skywarp said, "You're such a fragging liar!"

"Okay, okay!" Starscream's voice could get surprisingly shrill. "I didn't want you to think I was crazy! All right?"

"Starscream, you wound us," Thundercracker said, still laughing.

"What! Are you telling me you would have believed me if you _hadn't_ been seeing things too?"

Thundercracker shrugged. "I mean, no, of course not. But it still hurts."

Before they could really get into arguing—Mesothulas had noticed some faint laser burns on the walls and floor—Mesothulas asked, "Starscream, why did you think it was only you who was experiencing strange things? If the apartment’s haunted, wouldn’t everyone be having the same experiences?"

Starscream crossed his arms tighter, glowering down at the floor. "Because it's not haunting the apartment. It's haunting me."

"Oh, come on," Skywarp said. "I know you think the world revolves around you, but—"

"I'm serious! This has been happening to me since _long_ before I moved here. All of it—the floating stuff, the glowing, the dread at night—"

"And you didn't tell us?" Thundercracker snapped.

"No! _Obviously!_ How would that look on my roommate application? 'By the way, I'm bringing a _pet poltergeist_, it's very quiet but sometimes it _breaks_ things.'"

"You didn't fill out an application for—"

"_That's beside the point!_"

Part of Mesothulas wanted to sit back and wait to see whether they actually came to blows. The other part of him was keenly conscious of how close his chair was to the three of them and their piles of weapons. He waved to get Starscream's attention. "So, you know it's attached to you. That's very useful. Details like that will help us figure out what exactly it wants—and once we know that, it should be a cinch to get it to disperse." Or, more likely, details like that would help them figure out what was going on with Starscream—whether it was an overactive electromagnetic field or an overactive imagination—so they could address it.

Starscream gave him a distrustful look. "Hm."

Hmph. Not terribly enthusiastic, was he. Mesothulas supposed they couldn't _all_ be, but he confessed he was getting to enjoy the relieved gratitude of their clients. "When did this poltergeist latch onto you? Do you know? Or did it appear more gradually?"

Starscream's gaze flicked away, and he frowned, obviously thinking something over—like he was deciding whether to share something.

"You do know, don't you?" Mesothulas leaned toward him. "Come—we can't help as effectively without all the information.”

Starscream gave him an irritated look, but reluctantly said, "It's been with me since I lived in Vos. Since..." He faltered a moment, then started again, "I—attended this political rally once. There was some kind of explosion. Some people died that day. I think, maybe, one of them latched on to me." He shrugged helplessly. "It's the only explanation."

They'd see about _that_. It was certainly traumatic—certainly the kind of thing that might _cause_ someone to feel haunted. If it was only Starscream, Mesothulas might be ready to pursue survivor's guilt as the source of the poltergeist. But with his other two roommates experiencing the same thing...

Mesothulas wondered if they shared any equipment that needed to be hardlined. Computers, comms—hell, _each other_, maybe—he wondered if trauma-based delusions were contagious...

The recharge room door slid open, and Prowl rushed through it so fast his door kibble clipped the still-opening door with a loud clang. He stopped just outside the door and hit the button to slide it shut. His face was even, but there was something unnerved in his bright optics that he couldn't quite hide.

The room looked at Prowl. Prowl looked at the room. “… What?"

"Ohhh!" Thundercracker pointed. "You sensed it too! Didn't you?!"

Prowl frowned at him. "I didn't say that."

"What was it?" Mesothulas asked, momentarily slipping out of his role and giving Prowl a genuinely worried look. Prowl didn't _get_ unnerved. Not by ghost debunkings.

Prowl shifted. "I—felt _something_." He grimaced.

"Really," Starscream said flatly. "I thought you were supposed to be the skeptic." He gestured between Prowl and Mesothulas. "Isn't that how these things usually work, one believer and one skeptic?" Mesothulas cringed under the accusation. Oooh, he was savvier than Mesothulas had realized.

Prowl, however, raised his chin and defensively said, "I _am_ the skeptic." Mesothulas resisted the urge to facepalm. "I didn't say I felt a..." He made a vague wiggly gesture with his fingers that Mesothulas _knew_ Prowl had picked up from him, a dismissive mockery of woo-woo things like ghosts. "Just—something. I don't know what yet."

Skywarp drawled, "I think most people would call it a poltergeist." Prowl set his mouth in a straight line, but had the sense not to argue.

Mesothulas wasn't counting on that to last, though. He stood. "We should compare notes," he said, gesturing Prowl closer. "I think I've got a good lead from Starscream. Let's go down to the lobby."

###

"Are you alright?" Mesothulas asked quietly. He wanted to reach for Prowl's hand, but in an apartment lobby, with cameras that may or may not work, all he could do was lean closer and wring his own hands together. "What happened?"

"Nothing. It's nothing." Prowl shook his head, staring at the opposite wall. "It just—ugh. Felt weird."

Mesothulas almost laughed at Prowl's obvious self-disgust. He got on so poorly with feelings. (Didn’t they both, in their own ways?) Mesothulas had seen him turn that disdain on so many people—including Mesothulas, at times—that it was almost amusing to see him turn it on himself. Well, his Prowl had certainly never been a hypocrite.

"We need to do more tests," Prowl continued. "See what's going on."

"What do you think it was?" Mesothulas asked. "Something in the air? Or something electromagnetic, or...?"

Prowl's head jerked up slightly and his doors twitched. "Electromagnetic. Yes. It was—there were _some_ kind of weird electromagnetic readings. That's what it was. There were—" He halted for a moment, and Mesothulas practically felt his air compressor freeze as he waited for Prowl to go on. “There was—some kind of... static in the air. Near the recharge slab. It felt..." He looked at the ceiling, searching for words, then gave an annoyed sigh.

"If it would help, you can make up words," Mesothulas offered. Prowl gave him a look. "Would you say it was more woogly? Or crungy?"

"_Mesothulas_. Don't be..." But then a laugh slipped out. Prowl propped his elbows on his knees and laced his hands in front of his face, but Mesothulas could see him trying not to smile. "... Maybe sixty percent woogly."

"Ah. Just as I suspected." Mesothulas smiled.

Prowl looked back at the ceiling. To avoid laughing again, Mesothulas suspected. "We need to get something in here to read the EM activity in that room. My doors aren't refined enough to figure out what's going on in there."

"_Really_." That was almost as alarming as the look Prowl had given when he'd come out of the recharge room. Reading electromagnetic fields was—was silly. They'd _always_ agreed that using EMF meters was silly—always agreed that little EM-detecting devices were just props used by unscrupulous fake paranormal investigators to pretend they were scientists. They had almost always gotten by just fine using Prowl's doors, and only needed to pull out real EMF meters _after_ they'd figured out what was going on and needed a machine to show the same incontrovertible evidence to their clients. Using one _during_ their investigation was nearly unprecedented. Quietly, Mesothulas asked, "Was it really that bad?"

"Oh, don't— I detected _something_ in there, that's _all_ I know, and my systems are _not_ refined enough to figure out what. So—so, I think it's necessary. That doesn't mean I'm— I mean, they could have weird light bulbs leaking magnetic fields that interfere with their brains, who knows. _I'm_ not going to know until we get some better readings."

Mesothulas sat back as Prowl snapped at him. “All right. Okay. Sure." First time for everything, Mesothulas supposed. Even if something in his chassis twisted with worry over Prowl. "Exactly... what _did_ it feel like? You can use subjective words. In fact, I insist."

Prowl sighed. But after a moment, said, "Creepy."

"'Creepy'? That's it?"

"That's it. Creepy like a—like the scene of a murder. There's an explanation, though."

"Oh, of course," Mesothulas hastily agreed, "there's _always_ an explanation." He paused. Then grinned. "What if the explanation is actually a gho—"

"Shush," Prowl said. "Shush, no, I don't want to hear it."

Mesothulas cackled. "I can hope."

###

"I dunno, do you _have_ to stay the night?" Skywarp muttered, frowning at the floor.

"We don't _have_ to," Mesothulas said. "But it almost always helps. Especially when most of the activity is at night."

"It's just—would you be on the clock the whole time?—we've all got our stipends for being in the Seeker reserves, but none of us are employed right now, and those stipends aren't the endless energon fountains that Proteus makes them sound like on TV..."

"I know," Prowl said. "I'm getting the enforcer one. It hardly covers rent."

Skywarp immediately looked relieved. "Oh, I didn't realize you were a— Do you still have the...?" He gestured vaguely back over his shoulder.

Prowl turned sideways, flipping a door forward so Skywarp could see his light bar. "Inbuilt, not installed."

"We charge by the case, not the hour," Mesothulas said. "Half cost if we don't resolve your paranormal disturbance."

"And we take clients’ incomes into account when deciding the bill. Stipends get discounts.”

Skywarp laughed shakily. "Wow. I never thought I'd be _glad_ to hear that you're an enforcer. No offense."

"I don't get offended," Prowl brazenly lied.

"Why'd you leave?"

Prowl paused. "Probably for the same reasons you didn't think you'd be glad to hear I was one."

As Mesothulas had suspected, the fliers didn't have a wash rack—they shared with the floor. It was just a living room and a recharge room, and Starscream refused to sleep with strangers in the room. So they spread out in the living room as much as they could, Mesothulas near the door to the hall and Prowl near the door to the recharge room, and tried to get comfortable.

"I wonder if he realizes he's just making it more difficult for us by refusing to let us in the recharge room. You'd think someone who got himself _arrested_ trying to deal with his ghost would be marginally cooperative," Mesothulas groused. "In fact, I would have appreciated _any_ sort of gratitude out of him. Maybe a bit of, you know, that burgeoning hope for a light at the end of the tunnel that some clients get? Even his roommates didn't seem too impressed with us."

"Not every client is. They probably don't think we'll do any good," Prowl said. "Starscreech wouldn't have gone—"

"Starscream."

"—Starscream wouldn't have gone to get help from a person he thought was an actual god of death if he had any faith left that Cybertronians could help out."

"It seems like he skipped straight past even _trying_ Cybertronians." Mesothulas nodded around the apartment. "Notice anything missing?"

Prowl glanced around at the anarchy on the shelves. “Hygiene?"

Mesothulas spluttered a laugh. "Yes, but no. What about religious paraphernalia? Charms to drive off spirits—salt rocks and the like?"

Prowl looked around again. "... Hm." Utterly absent. There could be multiple reasons for that—maybe in his self-consciousness Starscream didn't want his roommates to see them; maybe he'd already tried them before moving in and seen that they did nothing; maybe he'd only recently been driven to take action and decided to start at the top directly with a god; maybe whatever personal superstitions he carried around allowed for the possibility of gods but not anti-ghost talismans. Or maybe he didn't actually want to get rid of the ghost. Who knew.

Mesothulas grabbed one of the fliers' textbooks off of the floor for something to read—it was on organic xenobiology, which he'd always found distantly interesting but had yet to find an opportunity to properly study—while Prowl fiddled with a few sensors he'd set up around the room. Mesothulas read the table of contents and clicked on the chapter about organic modes of creation.

Prowl sat down in front of the recharge room door and pulled out a datapad. “Mesothulas?”

“Hm?”

“I’m working on our article on Mirage’s room. Do you have your notes from the follow-up trip?”

“Oh—oh yes, hold on.” Mesothulas pulled out the datapad he’d been hauling around for the past few days, slid it across the floor to Prowl, and returned his attention to his pilfered textbook. He scrolled to the section on evolution.

They were both silent for a couple of minutes, before Prowl spoke. “This datapad also contains your notes on the Overlord case."

"Mhmm?" Mesothulas was searching the index for a section that explained what “alleles” were.

“And I'm a bit perplexed as to why your notes contain rudimentary blueprints for that spark extraction device we talked about. Or a detailed chemical formula for some unusual energon variety."

"Mhm?" It took Mesothulas a moment to register what Prowl had said. He froze.

"In a different person's handwriting, no less."

Mesothulas gave Prowl a sheepish look. Prowl looked unimpressed. "Yes. Well," Mesothulas said. "You see..." He had no explanation. He fell silent.

"Whose is it?"

Mesothulas squirmed. "Er. Shockwave's."

"_Shockwave_ was there?! He certainly wasn't arrested!"

"I—I thought he might find it academically interesting, but I, well, I thought it was unfair to get him _arrested_ when he didn't know what I'd invited him to watch—"

"You helped him esc—?!" Prowl dropped his face into his palm. Mesothulas's head sank into his shoulders in sync with Prowl's irritated sigh. "Okay. I... okay. How did you even _find_ him to invite him to..."

Mesothulas wasn't quite ready to admit exactly how frequently he made a point of crossing paths with Shockwave. If Prowl had kept prodding, in a fit of desperation, Mesothulas probably would have tried to distract Prowl by asking him what he and Tumbler had talked about yesterday. Mesothulas _was_, actually, wildly curious about what Prowl and Tumbler had talked about—he just had no idea how to ask without sounding _too_ interested.

But Prowl's question trailed off. Mesothulas, therefore, decided to act like Prowl hadn't really meant to ask it. Which was probably a good thing, because in retrospect he wasn't sure whether trying to switch the topic from Shockwave to Tumbler would be more revealing about what Mesothulas thought about Shockwave or what Mesothulas thought about Tumbler.

Prowl waved the datapad. "Just... What _is_ this formula?"

Mesothulas perked up. "Oh, it's a—well, he _says_ it's an energon formula to create an elixir to revive the dead. Don't laugh!" (Prowl hadn't yet, but Mesothulas didn't want to give him the chance.) "The formula is—well—coherent. Chemically sound, I mean to say. You actually _can_ create the elixir it describes—"

"And," Prowl asked, "does it actually raise the dead." Prowl's voice was _always_ flat; but, with enough practice, it was possible to tell the difference between his normal flat voice and an actual deadpan.

Mesothulas squirmed some more. "Well... I can't fully— That is to say, I haven't specialized in the same fields as Shockwave, so it's difficult for me to, er, to determine the exact effects of his formula merely from reading it. But if I were to recreate it, it would be a simple matter to test..."

"How long would that take," Prowl asked, in a voice that suggested he'd already done the math and already knew.

"... Er. Approximately... five million years."

"I'm sure he's absolutely thrilled that you're giving him five million years' worth of benefit of the doubt."

Mesothulas sighed irritably, tossing down his borrowed textbook. "It's hardly _his_ fault that the chemical reactions are so slow! You can't just choose what chemical reactions get your desired results!"

"Unless your desired result is 'make it take so long that the people you're trying to impress will have to take it on faith that your formula does what you say.'"

Mesothulas made a several-second-long noise of spluttering indignation that Prowl stoically endured. "You've _heard_ him talk and _seen_ some of his work; I don't know why you so stubbornly refuse to entertain the possibility that he might in fact be capable of any of the scientific feats he claims he is."

"Because he's never _demonstrated_ the ability to perform any of them," Prowl said. "He struts about talking like he's the single greatest scientific mind on Cybertron, and he yammers on about strange elixirs and all-powerful magical rocks that, if he could _produce_ one, would easily back up his claims to brilliance. But unlike _you_, he has _never_ shown any evidence of actualizing any of his grand projects."

"_And?_" Mesothulas snapped. "From the perspective of the rest of Cybertron, no one has any evidence of the wonders _I've _accomplished, either."

Prowl opened his mouth, considered that, shut it, and looked down. "You've got subspace pockets," he mumbled.

"The lab holds the patent."

"I know, but—everyone knows about them." But his mumbles were getting mumblier. He looked down at the datapad.

Mesothulas gave him a moment. "So, you think I'm one of the greatest scientific minds on Cybertron?"

Prowl jolted. "I didn't say that."

"No, but you implied it."

"I did not, I—"

"So you're saying you _don't_ think that?"

Prowl's jaw clicked shut.

Mesothulas cackled. "You flatter me!"

"Shh, sh, our clients are trying to sleep." When Mesothulas kept giggling, Prowl said, “And I almost forgot to mention—Security Services sent me a copy of the autopsy results from yesterday, too. It seems that the murder victim is missing his shins?"

Mesothulas stopped laughing with a choked squeak. "You don't say."

"I don't suppose you'd know something about that?"

Prowl stared at Mesothulas. Mesothulas stared back. Prowl stared harder. Mesothulas squirmed.

"Mesothulas..."

He whined. "Do you know _how hard_ it is to get ethically-sourced dead body parts these days? And he died from a bifurcated spark casing! It’s not like anybody _needs_ his shins for the autopsy."

"_Mesothulas_..."

"But Prowl, they were such _nice_ shins!"

Prowl sighed. "... Warn me next time?"

Mesothulas beamed. "Of course."

They settled in for the night.

###

An hour and a half in, when Mesothulas was deep in a section on the mechanics of flight without engine propulsion (it was rather distasteful, he thought, that it was written like it was such an exotic alien affair, when plenty of beastformers could fly the same way), Prowl suddenly skittered across the floor like a startled animal and pressed up against Mesothulas's side.

Mesothulas almost jumped out of his armor. "Prowl, what the _hell_—?"

"I don't know," Prowl hissed. "I don't know, I don't know."

His eyes were so bright with terror. Mesothulas immediately wrapped an arm around his waist. "What is it?" He didn't know why he was whispering. Prowl's fingers dug into a seam on Mesothulas's side.

"I don't—" He shook his head. "There is—_something_ going on over there and I do _not_ want to be near it alone."

"Together, then?"

Prowl hesitated, warily eyeing the spot where he'd been keeping guard, then nodded.

They shuffled across the room together, Mesothulas slightly ahead as Prowl reluctantly dragged behind him. Mesothulas stretched his hand toward the door. "Oh," he whispered, "this is one hell of a cold spot." He didn't even need to pull out a thermometer. "Was it this cold earlier?"

"No, I've been regularly checking the temperature."

Mesothulas leaned further into the cold spot; Prowl pulled away from Mesothulas to avoid it. "That's it, though. It's just cold. Surely you weren't spooked by cold?"

"No! There's something over here that—that—fffeels awful and I _hate_ how woo-woo that sounds—"

"'Woo-woo.'"

"—but I don't _have_ the data yet to describe it more concretely. It's a, a dread-inducing spot! Spontaneously generated dread! You're going to think I'm getting scared over nothing."

Mesothulas turned away from the cold spot and put both hands on Prowl's shoulders. "That's absolutely _not_ what I think, because I know you well enough to know that you break out in a rash in the presence of superstitious attitudes." (Prowl snorted.) "If you're creeped out, then it's because there's something in the environment causing it. Something you can detect that I can't. And I am giddy to find out what."

"You hope it really is a ghost."

"Eh." Mesothulas shrugged.

Prowl eyed the door warily. "Earlier there was... something electromagnetic in the recharge room. I've got electromagnetic sensors that you haven't, so..."

"A hitherto-unknown EM phenomenon that triggers feelings of dread?" Mesothulas suggested. "Try turning your door sensors off."

Prowl nodded. And in a moment, visibly relaxed. "Huh."

"A clue." Mesothulas grinned.

"That was... _powerfully_ unpleasant," Prowl said.

"Unpleasant enough that if you were being constantly inundated with it and didn't know it had an electromagnetic origin, you might start imagining presences watching you and objects moving in the corner of your vision?"

"Exactly. Do you know what kind of EMF meters are built into their frame model? Maybe they're detecting it too. It would certainly explain why Starscream was convinced this phenomenon was 'following him,' if he was sensing an EM frequency like that in places where nobody else could feel it. And why it wasn't until he had roommates with the same frame model that everyone became 'haunted.'"

"Most of my anatomical knowledge is in forged beastformers and triplechangers. The only mass-produced frame model I know anything useful about is yours. Still," Mesothulas tapped one of Prowl's doors, "your frame can be configured into a jet too. The point of mass-produced frame models _is_ to make them quickly because they're near-identical; I wouldn't be surprised if your model’s car doors and jet wings are given the same sensors as his model’s wings. But I can look that up tomorrow."

Prowl nodded, then looked back at the cold spot. "In the meantime," he said, "I'd better turn my sensors back on so I can map its exact location."

Mesothulas squeezed Prowl’s hand.

Prowl walked back and forth, meticulously measuring the ambient electromagnetic energy in the living room air, while Mesothulas waited by the front door out of his way. When Prowl had finished his circuit, Mesothulas said, "Well, _whatever_ it is, it's definitely worse by the recharge room. Probably _in_ the recharge room. I doubt we'll find exactly what it is until they allow us in there at night.”

"How can you tell it’s in there?” Prowl asked. "You're right, but I haven't reported my findings yet."

"Because you keep steering wide around the door."

"Oh."

Mesothulas chuckled. "I think we've found out all we can until we get those EMF meters. Sit with me. The cold spot can keep its own company tonight."

Prowl leaned against Mesothulas's shoulder and read along with him from the borrowed textbook.

###

"Well," Mesothulas said, when the fliers emerged from their recharge room, "there's _definitely_ something going on here."

"Yeah." Skywarp flopped on the couch beside Prowl, picked up several mostly empty energon cubes and swished them around to see how congealed the fuel was, and started pouring the contents that were still liquid into one cube. Prowl scooted over to give him more room.

"What happened?" Thundercracker asked, rummaging through the shelves for shower supplies. "Anything start floating?"

"No, all we witnessed was a cold spot," Mesothulas confessed. "But it was the most psychically active cold spot I've ever felt."

Starscream leaned on the couch’s armrest. Prowl leaned the other way, brushed Skywarp's elbow, and grimaced. "Oh, _really_,” Starscream said. “And what, pray tell, does 'psychically active' mean?"

"It's a highly technical bit of industry jargon,” Mesothulas said, "meaning 'absolutely fragging terrifying.'" Skywarp barked a laugh.

Starscream looked down at Prowl. "And do you back up his assessment?"

Prowl paused. Mesothulas paused his vents, hoping Prowl wasn't about to stick his foot in his mouth. "... More or less."

Starscream frowned. "Really! You, the nonbeliever. Did you really convert in one night?"

"He said there's definitely _something_, we didn't _say_ it was a ghost—"

Mesothulas hissed a shushing sound.

Prowl was carefully trying to scoot to the edge of the couch without looking too much like he was trying to escape the masses of armor and wings squeezed in on either side of him. "We've detected some irregularities that our current equipment isn't refined enough to identify," he said. "We're going to have to get some more refined EMF meters and come back."

"Well _that_ sounds like a crock of slag," Starscream snapped. "If you have better equipment, why didn't you bring it the first time? Not dragging out the process on purpose so the final bill will reflect more hours on the job, I hope?"

Tipping back his head so he could look down his nose at Starscream, Skywarp said, "They're paid by the case, not by the hour, _Starscream_." And with his correction delivered, he sipped daintily from his cube of mixed old energon, pinky out.

Starscream gave him a look of supreme disgust and leaned closer to say, "Could you try _not_ swilling revolting concoctions like that?"

Skywarp leaned back, waving his cube in Starscream's face. "Could you try _finishing_ your cubes instead of leaving them half-empty everywhere so I don't _have_ to?"

Prowl, trapped in the middle, gave Mesothulas a desperate look.

Thundercracker, who'd collected a bucket, a detergent, and a brush, said, "Yeah, go get your fancy equipment. I think getting some kind of EM scan in here is a good idea. That's how you usually find ghosts, right?"

Skywarp broke off his glaring contest with Starscream to nod in agreement. "I've definitely been sensing some funky electricity in here."

If the fliers had even noticed it themselves, it meant Mesothulas and Prowl were on the right track.

"Great. Then we'll go do that." Prowl took the opportunity to jump to his feet. "Mesothulas?"

To the fliers, Mesothulas said cheerily, "We'll be back as soon as we can."

###

"I think the cameras actually work," Mesothulas murmured, watching one as they passed through the lobby. "I'm pretty sure that one was pointed in a different direction yesterday.”

"They turn one point five degrees per minute."

"Ah. I'm glad one of us was keeping track."

They stopped outside and huddled together by the front wall to coordinate their plans. Because they rarely ever used EMF meters besides Prowl's doors, they only had one that was any good: a device that Mesothulas had lovingly built based on the blueprints he and Prowl made during their first meeting. However, it had terrible battery life—ten minutes of use and they had to charge it an hour—so it was far easier to use a different scanner to locate the general problem area, and then use their better scanner to identify exactly what it was they were looking at.

Which meant they needed to borrow a less-refined EMF meter to do the initial scans before pulling out the good one.

Which meant it was time to call in an old favor Ratchet owed them.

They agreed that Prowl would make the trip to Rodion—Ratchet wasn't terribly fond of Mesothulas—while Mesothulas went back to the apartment, got their own scanner, and did some research on the sensitivity of their clients' frame model’s wings. Although Rodion was one of Iacon's largest suburbs, it was sprawling enough that Prowl would have a fair drive just to get there.

They parted in front of the apartment to complete their tasks.

###

"You're an idiot," Ratchet said, hands on his hips. "I want you to know that. You're both idiots. Off hunting down fantasies. I don't know this Mesothulas bot you've run off with well enough to tell if that's normal for him, but I know _you_ just well enough to know that you're too smart for this, and I've been meaning to tell you so for cycles now—"

"Okay. Yes. Thanks." Prowl was so just barely in Ratchet's office that his doors were still out in the hallway. "We just need to use it to find the source of some weird EM frequencies—"

Ratchet shook the spark scanner Prowl was trying to borrow. "_This equipment is designed to detect sparks_. What do you expect to find with it, if not a ghost?"

“A mechanical source for an EM field that happens to be within the same frequency range as a spark?" Prowl held out a hand hopefully.

Ratchet sighed, but smacked the scanner into Prowl's hand. "You're wasting your potential."

"I've heard that lately."

“Remember the first time we met?" Ratchet asked. “When Orion and his senator friend latched onto that conspiracy theory about Nominus's death that didn't pan out, you were the _one_ person there who was calling it a crock of slag. Even when your partner bought into it. What happened? Now he's the one working here, and you've downgraded to a…”

Rage leaped up Prowl's throat. "Okay, bye Ratchet. Bye." He stepped back out of Ratchet's office. "Bye. Good to see you."

Ratchet winced. "Scr—I'm sorry, Prowl, I didn't mean... I meant your _job_, not your—"

"Tell Wheeljack I said hi. I didn't cross paths with him the last time I was in Kaon." Prowl turned away from Ratchet and started down the hall. "Don't tell Orion I said hi. Bye!"

He ignored Ratchet calling after him.

###

Their personal EMF meter was kept in a place of honor: right on their night table, next to the alarm clock and a digital talking board with a spindly light bulb and a letter-covered dial on top that spun back and forth, _supposedly_ responding to ghost-induced electromagnetic fluctuations to select letters. Mesothulas watched as the talking board twisted back and forth—N, X, W, I—flicked his hand over the bulb a couple of times so the static around his hand made the bulb light up and the dial switch direction, and scooped up the EMF meter.

After half an hour of sitting on top of one of his work tables, doing research at a computer, he’d turned up everything he needed to know about the fliers' default wing sensors. His work done, he pulled up a far more interesting area of research—Prowl's mix-and-match kibble frame model—and commed him. "Oh, Prowl?"

"Yes? What's up?"

"Would you be disappointed if we were in business a million years and never found evidence of a real ghost?" He scrolled to a diagram detailing the shoulder modifications that had to be done to convert a mix-and-match frame model from a jet alt-mode to a helicopter alt-mode, opened a second window detailing a mix-and-match car's anatomy, and picked up a datapad from the table—helpfully highlighted with two green sticky notes—where he continued his work of trying to combine both shoulders into one body.

"You mean, if we disproved and debunked tens of millions of falsely alleged ghost sightings? I'd consider that a resounding success."

"Oh." Mesothulas adjusted the axle so it didn't conflict with the rotors' internal mechanisms. "_I'd_ be disappointed if we never met a ghost. Not that debunking isn't a delight—but it would still be a bit of a letdown."

"Yes, I know. That's why none of my old friends can stand you."

Mesothulas cackled. "And you can't stand your old friends, either! How was Ratchet?"

"He finally said what he usually tries to keep to subtext."

"I'm surprised he found it in him to be so direct." How was Prowl feeling about it? He didn't sound terribly torn up, but with Prowl that didn't prove very much. Mesothulas would have to check in with him later. "I called to say that I've finished my research here. When do you want to meet back up at the apartment?"

"Barring unforeseen changes in traffic, I'll be there in about an hour and forty-two minutes."

"Seconds?"

"Current projection—eighteen and counting down."

"I adore you."

Prowl made an indignant wordless sound, mumbled, "Same," and abruptly hung up. Which was a lot more than Mesothulas thought he would receive. His spark soared.

He still had an hour and a half until he had to be back at the apartment. He slid off his table, retrieved a hollowed-out head with a missing optic from a chair, and returned to the computer. "Well," he asked, showing the head his blueprints for the modified shoulders. "What do you think? Do these look viable? Comfortable?"

The head, of course, said nothing.

"I suppose thinning the axle enough to not block any of the rotor's parts _does_ make it a bit fragile," Mesothulas lamented. "If I made it out of a strong enough material to prevent it from buckling, it'd be strong enough to drive through your spark chamber if you had an accident. And I'm _not_ risking that."

He considered his design ruefully for a moment; then perked up. "Or," he said, "if I leave it at its original thickness, but increase the size of the _rest_ of the frame around it, it would maintain its thickness while allowing more room for the rotor parts. And increasing the overall frame size would solve so many other problems, too. All those wires I wasn't sure how to get through your hips…” He picked up the shins he’d swiped from yesterday’s corpse. “Of course, this means I can't use _these_ anymore—but maybe as forearms..."

He set the hollow head in his crossed legs, resized the frame, and got to work modifying the frame accordingly.

A few minutes later, he glanced over at the shins. Hm. They were a nice shade of green. Maybe he ought to consider that for the final product.

###

He was, of course, half an hour late to rendezvous with Prowl.

###

"_Whatever_ was going on here, it's a lot weaker today than it was last night," Prowl said. He was diligently waving Ratchet's spark scanner through the fliers' recharge room. Whenever it reacted to something, he turned on their own EMF meter for a few seconds to record the exact frequencies and shape of the field. "But, whatever it is, we've got a map of it now."

The fliers had elected to make themselves scarce while Prowl and Mesothulas were working. Starscream and Skywarp were out; and Thundercracker was in the living room, watching a political drama on a portable hologram TV—probably to stand guard in case the strangers in their home decided to steal something.

Prowl passed both scanners to Mesothulas. Mesothulas turned on the spark scanner and waved it around experimentally, testing a patch of air near the recharge slab where Prowl had spent an unusually long time.

"The weird thing is, nothing in particular seems to be producing the EM field,” Prowl said. He pulled up a datapad synced with their scanners, and used it to show Mesothulas a 3D model of the room and the meandering trails of odd energy wandering through it—roughly at shoulder-height, which explained how Prowl's doors picked it up so easily, but sometimes up near the ceiling or by the floor too. "It's not near the walls or any particular equipment. It's just... hanging out in the middle of the air."

"Ooooh. I've got something you're not going to like." Mesothulas studied the spark scanner's display.

"What."

Mesothulas tapped the display, pointing at the numbers that—to someone with Mesothulas's level of medical training—looked very dire. "According to Ratchet's spark scanner, the thing that's been in the air around here was a dying spark." He beamed.

Prowl snorted. "You mean it's got an energy signature that _resembles_ that of a dying spark."

"_Naturally_."

A thoughtful look crossed Prowl's face. "If it's in that frequency range, though... that might explain why this room feels like—like the scene of a murder."

"Oh?" Mesothulas lowered the spark scanner.

"It's been well-documented that for some time after a death, the EM field of the victim will disperse through the room. It can be disconcerting enough that it drives some mechaforensic investigators away from the job. So if there's an energy field in here that's wildly dissipated and in the same frequency range as a dying spark..."

"Hmm." Mesothulas looked around the room. "_Or_, our clients are serial killers and they've mixed their dismembered victims in with their other detritus."

"You're ridiculous." But Prowl looked skeptically at the trash on the floor anyway.

###

They mapped the living room without incident—after shooing Thundercracker to watch his show in the recharge room so they wouldn't accidentally pick up his EM field. With both rooms mapped and Starscream and Skywarp returned for the night, Prowl and Mesothulas settled into the apartment for their second night.

“I thought you only stayed the first night?” Starscream asked.

“For a typical case where we can trust the average camera to pick up the unusual phenomena, yes,” Mesothulas said. “But with the strange EM fields we’ve been picking up in your apartment, and how _mobile_ they are—it seems prudent for us to be available to monitor how they change more directly.”

Skywarp and Thundercracker nodded in agreement, while Starscream pressed his lips together tightly. “Hm. I’m not exactly fond of having strangers in my living room. If you don’t find anything of note tonight, I’d prefer if you stick to more remote monitoring on future nights.”

“I’d prefer it too,” Prowl muttered.

###

Prowl sat near the recharge room door for over an hour, back straight and doors stiff. When no cold spot materialized to engulf him, he slowly relaxed. Mesothulas pulled out the datapad he'd stuffed in his chest armor when he'd realized he was late returning to Prowl, and resumed work on his anatomical blueprints.

"I've been thinking," Prowl said.

"About?"

"Shockwave's energon elixir." He managed to say each word with three distinct forms of disdain.

"Oh." Mesothulas suppressed a sigh. "What about it."

"The primary issue with it—testing what it is, I mean—is the fact that it takes five million years to, er, brew or whatever. Correct?"

"Yes, as you pointed out."

"What if the five million years were condensed?"

Mesothulas paused, then looked up at Prowl. "How do you mean?"

"I mean, what if... You've got that design for a time machine you're messing with, right?"

"It doesn't work yet."

"Well, no, of course not, it's a time machine." (Mesothulas snorted. Ye of little faith.) "But that's beside the point—what if you had, just... a self-contained box of time."

"A box of time," Mesothulas repeated skeptically.

Prowl gestured. "Like... time machines don't work because it involves altering the fabric of the space-time continuum. But if you possessed a box—like, say, a subspace pocket—whose space-time continuum you _could_ control completely—does it work that way, or...?"

Mesothulas bolted upright. "Oh, that's—that's brilliant. Yes. Yes, it _does_ work that way. Subspace pockets are pocket dimensions separate from the normal universe—if I set up one to—"

"—move much faster than ours, chronologically—"

"Brilliant! And then just dump the developing ore in—" Mesothulas scrolled to a blank section on his datapad and started scribbling. "Imagine! An elixir of life!"

"Or a dud."

Mesothulas waved off his skepticism. "In either case—a scientific breakthrough. And there are countless other things we could do with it."

Prowl scooted across the room to watch over Mesothulas's shoulder as he wrote. "Be sure to get the patent on this one. We could probably sell it to high grade refineries."

"And who knows what else! The possibilities are endless, my muse."

After another fifteen minutes of work on his new blueprints, Mesothulas glanced over at Prowl to realize he'd fallen asleep on Mesothulas's shoulder. Mesothulas decided to let him sleep. It wouldn't be a proper recharge without plugging into a slab, but it would at least help him preserve what energy he had left. Prowl didn't cope very well with long strings of all-night stakeouts.

Prowl had left the thermometer over by the recharge room door; if the cold spot came back, Mesothulas would be able to tell. Prowl could rest.

He quietly resumed work on the new blueprints.

###

There was a scream from the neighboring apartment.

Suddenly Prowl was missing, and the only clues Mesothulas had to where he'd gone were a breeze past his shoulder and an open door behind him. He scrambled to his feet and followed.

He made it out into the hallway just in time to see Prowl kick in the next door over—_Primus below,_ Mesothulas didn't know he could kick like that—and charge in, shouting, "Iaconian Mechafffppt _Paranormal Investigators!_ Who— What's going on?"

Prowl was clearly only about 40% awake, he was staring around the apartment like he had no idea how he'd ended up there, and Mesothulas had to lean against the doorframe behind him, wheezing with laughter.

The apartment owner, some kind of SUV, was standing in the middle of his living room and looked to be at about the same level of wakefulness and confusion as Prowl. “Oh—thank Primus you got here so fast! There’s a ghost in my recharge room!”

Prowl paused. “What? There’s no such thing as—”

Mesothulas shoved his back. “We’ll go check it out! Come _on_, Prowl.”

In they charged, and—there was nothing. A TV was on, showing news from Harmonex. A bookcase had fallen over, dropping a few etched metal pictures and small alien-shaped knickknacks outside its shelves. Mesothulas surveyed the scene, then leaned against Prowl, hand on his shoulder. “A noise on the TV?” he murmured. “Or he was startled by the bookcase falling?”

Prowl was silent for a moment, looking around the room. Then he looked back at Mesothulas—clearly wide awake now—and murmured, “I’m going to get the EMF meter.”

Mesothulas froze. “Do you feel…?”

Prowl nodded.

“Go. I’ll interview him.”

Prowl slipped out of the room just as the SUV came in. He watched Prowl go, then turned to Mesothulas. “Where’s he going?”

“To get some of our equipment. He detected some unusual psychic activity in the room.” Mesothulas readied his datapad to type on, thought better of it, and stowed it. Instead, he slid his comm unit out of his head and set it to record. “Would you mind explaining what you experienced?”

“Yeah, uh—yeah. Of course.” The SUV rubbed his optics. “So, I never watch TV at night, right? But the TV woke me up—it just, turned itself on. And I felt like someone was in the room.”

The SUV had only just woken up, disoriented, and with a malfunctioning TV; he could have been easily confused. “Uh-huh, and then what?”

“Well, I—tried to turn the TV off, of course. And it turned itself back on.”

… He could have double-clicked the remote.

“Then I yelled at the TV, because… because I felt like something was in it?” He shrugged helplessly. “And some kind of… aura radiated out of it. It hovered over it for a second, zipped by the bookcase, and knocked it over.”

It could’ve been the tail end of a dream that got tangled with the real event of a bookcase falling. But for all the good, sound explanations Mesothulas was throwing at this phenomenon—his spark started spinning faster, eagerly.

“But, it… stopped over the bookcase as it was falling, and… caught it? When it was half fallen?”

It dawned on Mesothulas that they’d been alerted by this mech’s scream. But they’d never heard the bookcase crash down to the floor. There were trinkets and pictures scattered all over the floor—surely they should have heard all that come tumbling down. “The—_aura_ caught it, as you say? How? How does an ‘aura’ catch items?”

“I don’t know!” The SUV shrugged again. “It just floated over it and the bookcase froze in mid-air. All the stuff on the shelves slid out and fell on the floor. Then it dropped the bookcase and vanished through a wall.”

Oh, _please_ don’t let him have been dreaming. “This ‘aura’—what did it look like?”

“Like a…” The SUV fell silent. And then said, quietly, “Like a spark. A floating spark, all by itself.”

For a moment, Mesothulas stared at him in awe.

This had quickly escalated into a once-in-a-century case. Whether or not anything in this case turned out to be _real_—solving it was going to be one hell of an adventure.

He snapped himself out of his delight and started in on the follow-up questions. “So, tell me—has anything like this ever happened before?”

###

Prowl debated over the two scanners for a moment before finally grabbing them both and stuffing them in his thigh compartments.

When he returned to the neighboring apartment, Mesothulas and the SUV were sitting on either side of a kitchen table, Mesothulas listening attentively as the SUV said, “And it was so _cold_. It just came out of _nowhere_, like…”

Mesothulas waved Prowl past. “I’ll update you on his testimony later. Analyze the room, see if your findings line up with his story.”

“‘Line up’?” the SUV said, affronted. “Do you think I was lying?”

“Goodness me, no! But sometimes the part of an entity like this that’s detectable on the visible spectrum is only a small percentage of the whole entity, you see. It’s always prudent to check for any evidence of invisible phenomena you may have been unable to report…”

Prowl ignored Mesothulas’s prevaricating, returned to the doorway of the recharge room, and, reluctantly, stepped through.

The feeling of death hung so heavily over the room that Prowl found himself automatically watching his step as he crossed the floor, for fear of accidentally trodding on any crime scene evidence. The temperature fluctuated several degrees up and down as he crossed the room—he glanced down to see the glass of his headlights fogging up. He should have brought the thermometer, too. Too late to get it now; the borders of the cold spots were blurry and would probably mix back in with the warmer air in another moment.

He pulled out the spark scanner and got to work.

The spark-like energy was strongest near the TV—which Prowl didn’t consider conclusive; despite the fact that the scanner was designed to pick up the frequencies of sparks, it might still be mistakenly picking up the TV itself—but then the field moved over the TV; in a curving arc to where the bookcase used to stand; from there down to a spot just above where the bookcase now rested; and finally, through the wall opposite the TV over the recharge slab.

He called Mesothulas and the SUV in and pantomimed the path he’d found. He only needed to look at how Mesothulas was bouncing on his feet to know that the SUV’s testimony lined up. The SUV nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s exactly how the aura moved.”

“_And_,” Prowl said, kneeling by the bookcase and looking up at the two of them, “look at this—the way the objects scattered. Isn’t it strange?”

They stared at him blankly.

“Okay, let’s make this simple. If we consider the bookcase to be a sort of pendulum, with each shelf granting the objects on it a different radius, so to speak, from the center point, i.e., the floor, then from the angular momentum that the bookcase would have picked up while in free fall, the trajectory it granted the objects in it should have—"

“Hey, yeah, I know that Jhiaxian students have a certain reputation,” the SUV said, “but I’m actually an HR major.”

Prowl stared at him. “… It didn’t fall normally,” he said. “It fell freely until it was about twenty degrees from the floor, was caught, and lowered the rest of the way.”

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s just what I told—uh—” The SUV looked blankly at Mesothulas, then back at Prowl, “told your partner happened!” He paused. “Also, who the hell are you people? I mean—what are you _doing_ here. How did you get here so fast. What…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mesothulas said hastily. “Prowl—the TV is next to the wall connecting to our fliers’ apartment. It probably came from there. Which means this thing has moved into a third apartment.”

“No screams, though,” Prowl said. “Is the next apartment empty?” The SUV glanced at the wall and shook his head.

“Maybe the residents slept through it?” Mesothulas stepped around the SUV and made grabby hands at Prowl, so Prowl handed over the two scanners. “We should go check.”

“We can ask them in the morning.”

“No, I mean, _right now_.” Mesothulas tucked their own EMF meter under his arm and started going through Ratchet’s spark scanner.

“What, you mean just barge in?”

“Sure! Why not? We did it here.”

Prowl’s face heated up in embarrassment. They had, hadn’t they? “There was a scream, I thought someone was in danger.” He turned to the SUV and said quietly, “I apologize for destroying your door.”

The SUV waved him off. “Yeah, uh… no problem.” He sank down on his recharge slab.

“Well, just because the neighbor hasn’t screamed yet doesn’t mean someone _isn’t_ in danger,” Mesothulas said. “We should check. For their safety.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Prowl!”

“No.”

“_Please_?”

“No.”

“But it would be so exciting!”

“Yes, it would—but no, we’re not.”

Mesothulas harrumphed. Then glanced up at Prowl. “I’ve got something you’re not going to like.”

“What?”

Mesothulas held up Ratchet’s scanner. “Not only is the spark scanner convinced that this room is, in fact, a spark about four hours away from burnout; it’s even picking up the spark type.”

Mesothulas was right; Prowl didn’t like it. He eyed the spark scanner warily. “Do normal EM frequencies usually have spark types?”

There was a yelp from the wall behind the TV. Prowl started. “The fliers—“

“That’s Thundercracker!”

###

Thundercracker was sitting up on the pallet slab, trembling, vents heaving and thrusters sputtering. Skywarp, up on the recharge slab proper and closest to the wall, was leaned over Starscream, smacking Thundercracker in the back, saying, “Shake it off, mech, you ain’t dead. Pick your thrusters up, you’re gonna set something on fire.” Thundercracker wrapped his arms under his thighs, pulling his legs up so the thrusters were firing in the air instead of adding to the burn marks on the pallet.

Starscream, meanwhile, was staring at the ceiling in a miserable groggy daze. “I could be asleep,” he croaked. “I could be sleeping right now.” Mesothulas was keenly reminded of Prowl the morning after a long case. He glanced at Prowl to see if he had the same thought—

And found Prowl standing several feet outside the recharge room doorway, arms tightly crossed.

Mesothulas stared at him. Prowl shook his head, jaw set tight. Prowl was never like this. What in the world was happening in this apartment?

Okay. Mesothulas was on his own on this one. He turned back to the fliers. “What happened? Did you see something?”

“I had that dream again,” Thundercracker said, voice shaking. “That— the waking-up-feeling-like-you’re-trapped-in-a-corpse dream.”

“I get that dream all the time, too,” Skywarp said.

Starscream let out a sigh so long Mesothulas half expected the sudden drop in air pressure to suck Starscream’s fuel tank inside out. But he said, “Yeah. Me too.” He sat up, shoved Skywarp aside, and unplugged the two power cables connecting his upper back to Skywarp’s and Thundercracker’s. “Listen. I know your wheelhouse is finding ghosts left and right. But, at this point, if you’ve got a nice, simple, rational, scientific explanation for all this—it would be really, really great to hear. I think I’d _genuinely_ prefer this to all be in our heads than to be told that there’s actually someone dead getting into us.” He looked between Mesothulas and Prowl wearily. “So? What’s your diagnosis? What’s… all this? Why are we all having the same nightmare?”

Mesothulas hesitated. He didn’t think he’d ever been asked to _not_ agree that it was all ghosts before. He looked to Prowl for help.

Prowl shifted on his feet. “To confirm, do—I’m not judging, I’m asking for the sake of the investigation—do you always tend to wire into each other during recharge?”

“Uh, duh,” Skywarp said. “Do you know any Seekers that _don’t_ hardline at night?”

Prowl paused. “I—I don’t—know any Seekers, actually.”

Skywarp snorted. “Figures. You’re a cop first, army-builder second, huh?”

Mesothulas was fairly confident that Prowl wouldn’t get offended by that, but not that whatever he said next wouldn’t offend Skywarp, so he quickly cut in. “I’m sure Prowl is _going_ to point out that, given the stress all of you are under, you might be sharing the same recurring dream because you’re, ah—catching it from each other, via hardline, in your sleep.”

Prowl nodded in agreement.

“However, under the circumstances… it seems prudent to consider less conventional explanations.”

Prowl nodded even more enthusiastically.

“Does your apartment have any sort of group comm channel?

###

The next morning, using Thundercracker’s frequency, they posted a notice to the apartment channel: “If you’ve experienced any of the following: objects moving or disappearing; strange sensations of dread, static, or cold; sightings of strange lights; other inexplicable, unnatural, paranormal, or supernatural experiences in or around the building; or any other signs that you think are, could be, or resemble ghostly activity— please attend a meeting this evening in the apartment lobby. Please come with a pre-prepared list of things you’ve experienced. Don’t discuss your experiences with your neighbors before the meeting.”

Almost everyone in the apartment attended the Jhiaxian Academy, and the Academy had two separate schedules: the day classes and night classes. So they scheduled their meeting for an hour after day classes ended.

“Almost everyone takes day classes,” Thundercracker explained. “I think we’re the only ones in this building who took night classes.”

“Why are you always here at night, then?” Mesothulas asked, at the same time that Prowl asked, “‘Took’?”

“Dropped out,” Skywarp said. “Wasn’t worth fighting uphill all the time just for being fliers. What’re we gonna do with JAAT degrees, anyway?”

“They’re good for networking,” Thundercracker said, laughing. “If you’ve got the kind of alt people are willing to network with.”

Mesothulas and Prowl spent the morning in the property manager’s office, explaining the situation and the necessity of the meeting. Which they probably should have done before sending out a building-wide message; but after about half an hour he was willing to listen rather than yell at them about how they were con artists and lunatics, and after another half hour he grudgingly agreed that, if there _was_ something weird traveling between his building’s apartment units, it probably needed to be identified.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to going home to gather equipment for the presentation and then crashing on their slab for as much recharge as they could squeeze into—per Prowl’s strict scheduling—exactly one hour and sixteen minutes. They woke up feeling groggier than when they’d gone to sleep. They’d need the recharge, though. Who knew how many more all-nighters they’d be pulling before this case was resolved? And using energon to boost their energy wouldn’t hold them much longer if they couldn’t get in a proper defrag cycle.

And then they returned to the apartment.

###

There were eighty-one people packed into the lobby.

"I wish we could do this in a more controlled way," Mesothulas lamented, leaning on the box on a folding table they'd set up as a podium. "With everyone shouting out their paranormal experiences together, confirmation bias is going to run rampant. If we could interview everyone individually..."

"I know. Can't have perfect lab conditions everywhere." Prowl was kneeling on the floor, trying to get a hologram projector plugged in. "Hopefully, the fact that we asked them to prepare lists of their experiences _before_ arriving will reduce the odds of them spontaneously changing their stories to match their neighbors'."

"Reduce, but not eliminate," Mesothulas murmured. "Still, it's an impressive turnout. _That's_ got to say something. How much of the building is this?"

"Don't know. There are a hundred and forty apartment units. What do you estimate is the average number of residents per unit?"

"In a school neighborhood like this? Probably three or four."

"Three point five," Prowl concluded. "So this is about sixteen point five percent of the total residents. Is that statistically significant? What percentage of the general population thinks they're haunted?"

Mesothulas shrugged. "We should do a study." He scanned the crowd. "Hm. Starscream's here."

"Where?"

"At the back."

Thundercracker had commed earlier to say that he and Skywarp would make it, but there was a chance Starscream wouldn't. He was fuming over the fact that the whole apartment was now getting involved in this investigation. He'd threatened to un-hire Mesothulas and Prowl, but Thundercracker and Skywarp had said they were keeping them on and that Starscream would just have to deal with it.

Prowl got up on his knees and craned his neck. "I'm glad he changed his mind."

"_I'm_ not. He might be here to cause trouble."

"Hm."

Once Prowl got the projector set up, he took the datapad to run it, stepped back, and nodded. "Okay," Mesothulas said. "Thank you all for coming, especially on such short notice. We'll try to keep this as quick as we can."

"Hey," someone in the front row shouted, "you're here to tell us what the frag's been going on, right?"

Mesothulas laughed awkwardly. "Not quite yet, I'm afraid. We're here to try to figure it out. We’re going to compile all your information, and... see how it enlightens us. First, can everyone go around and give their room numbers and how many days in the last month you think you've experienced something supernatural? It doesn't have to be a precise number, just as near as you can remember."

As the residents gave their numbers, Prowl plugged them into a crude map of the apartment building on his datapad. Once they were all filled in, he forwarded the data to the hologram projector—and there was the building. The residents’ rooms were all clustered together in a solid orb of paranormal activity. The epicenter, with the most amount of supernatural sightings, was the fliers' unit.

Mesothulas and Prowl exchanged a look. Well, that fairly well confirmed that it really _was_ tied to those three, didn't it? Or at least to something they were keeping in their room.

The residents started murmuring to each other, trying to figure out if anyone knew who was in the center of that orb; at the back of the room, Starscream (who'd let Thundercracker report in for their room without speaking) slowly shrank into his seat.

Before the meeting could turn into a witch hunt, Mesothulas turned off the projector. "Great! Thank you, that's more or less what we were expecting—phenomena like this have a tendency to cluster on one randomly-chosen spot. Let's get down to specifics, now. We asked you all to come up with lists of what you've experienced; let's go around again and share what it is you've seen. Don't be concerned if it sounds outlandish or doesn't fit what your neighbors are seeing; these sorts of things can be _highly_ personal. Variation is natural. Would anyone like to volunteer to share what they've seen?"

The residents reported seeing glowing, floating lights, some going so far as to say they looked spark-like; electronics turning on and off; objects floating; possessions going missing; things being tossed around rooms; feelings of dread; feelings of being in the presence of death; feelings of being watched; feelings of someone else being in the room; cold spots; electrical spots; unintelligible whispers; touches; vague person-like shapes and shadows...

Mesothulas paused when Starscream raised his hand. But he didn't _look_ like he was planning to start trouble; rather, his hand was up, but his gaze was low, his mouth creased in a worried line. Mesothulas pointed at him. "Yes? What've you got?"

Starscream glanced up to confirm that he was the one being called on, then slowly lowered his hand. He reset his vocalizer. "I've... seen the person shape. Clearly. I know what the ghost looks like."

"What?!" Skywarp exploded. "_What?!_"

Thundercracker shoved him. "Why didn't you tell us!"

"Because it sounds crazy! I wasn't gonna admit it until someone else said they'd seen a person!"

Skywarp shoved his other side. "You _suck_, Starscream!"

"Screw you!"

Prowl stepped forward and barked, "_Hey!_"

All three fliers fell silent and looked at him.

Prowl stepped back and nodded at Mesothulas to continue.

"So," Mesothulas said, "What does the ghost look like?"

Starscream let out a shaky vent. "He's a short yellow bot. Round. Probably turns into a car, I think? Tiny horns?"

There was a moment of silence.

And then the entire room flipped its collective lid.

Twenty people were shouting at once. Twenty more were waiting their turn to shout. Mesothulas and Prowl both instinctively took a step closer to each other and ended up bumping shoulders.

After several minutes of anarchy, this was what they were able to work out: half the people in the room had seen the ghost. They'd witnessed it wandering in the hallways or glimpsed it as it turned a corner.

They had all assumed that it was a resident whose name they happened not to know. But although half the room had seen this specter, _no one_ recognized the description as any resident they knew. Not a single one knew a small yellow car with tiny horns. It couldn't have been a resident. What did that leave, then, but a ghost?

While the residents shouted over each other, recounting their sightings of this wandering spirit, Mesothulas glanced at Prowl questioningly. Prowl slowly shook his head. No. At this point, he had no rational explanations.

As more and more residents agreed they'd seen the little yellow ghost, Starscream looked more and more relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, I won't be answering questions that would involve giving away important spoilers—but otherwise I'm always happy to take questions & comments!


	5. Case 3, Part 2: Starscream and the Poltergeist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion of Prowl and Mesothulas's first big case! Enjoy!

It was rare that a case called for them to stay the night several nights in a row. Even more rare that a case called for them to split up at night. Most of their jobs were in apartments, and it was easy enough for them to camp out in one room, sometimes two with the door open between them, to monitor whatever needed to be monitored.

But every once in a long while, a case like this called for them to have to patrol a far wider area to cover all the ground that might be "haunted." (The quotes were beginning to feel more and more unnecessary.) And so what they usually did was have one of them remain in a set location while the other did a circuit around whatever area they needed to patrol.

Most of the time, Prowl did the circuit while Mesothulas stayed put. Prowl was, after all, _used_ to patrols of one form or another; and he was far more thorough and meticulous with their scanning equipment than Mesothulas tended to be.

Tonight, though, Mesothulas insisted they trade off. Even after their brief nap, by the end of the apartment meeting, Prowl had looked visibly drained. His optics were dim, his shoulders were sagging, it took him a moment to react to words. He'd been up for two and a half days with hardly a cumulative two hours of sleep. Mesothulas could handle that kind of schedule—as long as he upped his energon intake, he could run a week straight and just get more hyperactive as he went until he crashed all at once—but Prowl just went on a slow, steady decline into uselessness.

So even if he couldn't recharge, he could at least rest. He'd stay in the fliers' apartment. If he heard any screams, got covered by any cold spots, or had a comm from Mesothulas, he would wake and take action. Otherwise, he should conserve his energy. Mesothulas would handle the patrols tonight—back and forth on the fliers' floor, and the nearest floors above and below. He'd even try to be thorough with the spark scanner.

###

"Thorough," as it turned out, meant waving it in a vague and increasingly unenthusiastic infinity sign shape through the air while he walked around, for several hours straight. It wasn't _quite_ the most boring night of his life, but it ranked highly.

There were a few dim traces of dying spark energy early on in the evening, but they faded as the hours wore on, and there were no alarming noises in any of the apartment units. Around dawn, Mesothulas returned to the fliers' unit.

The door slid open, a gush of icy air blasted Mesothulas's face, and Mesothulas saw Prowl's frame standing rigid in the middle of the room—and the first thing Mesothulas _knew_ was that Prowl had died during the night. His spark almost stuttered to a stop.

But then Prowl turned to face him—Mesothulas's spark jolted again; and his eyes were wide and bleached white; and Mesothulas had to remind himself that Prowl hadn't gone gray, he was _always_ monochrome; and Mesothulas forced himself into the miasma of death in the cold room. The room felt too empty and the walls very far away. "Prowl, what—?"

The second thing Mesothulas knew was that Prowl had not gotten a second of sleep.

He was standing ramrod straight in the exact center of the room, doors pulled as close to his back as he could fit them. His arms were crossed so tight that the edges of his forearms left straight line indents across his bumper, so tight that he didn't uncross them even when Mesothulas tried to reach his hands. Mesothulas had never seen Prowl wearing anything close to the look of absolute terror he had on right now.

"Hi. Good to see you." Prowl's voice was very, very even, and very, very faint. "I would like you to handle this information as rationally, methodically, and scientifically as possible—but there is something in this room that very much wants me dead."

Mesothulas's spark lost its rhythm for the third time. He hissed, "Then _rationally_, you shouldn't be in the room," wrapped one hand around Prowl's waist and seized his elbow with the other, and tugged him out into the hall.

Once they'd made it that far, he seemed to remember how to propel himself, pulled out of Mesothulas's grip, and power walked for the stairs. It was the most forceful, self-controlled, and single-minded power walk Mesothulas had ever witnessed. Prowl was gone. Goodbye. So long.

"Wait!" Mesothulas chased after him. "Hold o— Prowl! What happened?"

He didn't answer. He just marched his way down the stairs. A couple of times he stumbled on the steps, nearly broke into a run, and visibly restrained himself to exercising what could only be considered the most extreme definition of a "walk.” Mesothulas followed helplessly, trying to figure out what in the world had happened last night.

Prowl finally stopped a block away from the apartment, sat down in the middle of the sidewalk, and pulled his knees up to his chest. Mesothulas didn't hesitate before dropping down beside Prowl, wrapping his arms around him, and holding him tight. "You're safe now," he whispered. "I've got you, love. You're safe."

"It—" Prowl choked on his words, mouth twisting, trying to coordinate himself enough to squeeze out a few syllables. If Prowl was falling apart now, how hard had he been pulling himself together to talk to Mesothulas in the living room? "It—f-felt—real."

"It doesn't matter." Mesothulas pressed the crest of his helm over Prowl's audial. "Even if it is real. I'm not going to let anyone or anything harm you, ever. Because if anything _dares_ to try, I'm building a portal to rip open the gates of whatever afterlife there may be, marching in, hauling the damn poltergeist out by its hardline cables, and doing something so awful to it that its own death will look like a hot spot festival in comparison."

Prowl trembled in Mesothulas's arms, and Mesothulas held him tight and whispered reassurance after reassurance in his audial.

(Some passing bot slowed down to look at them curled up on the sidewalk. Mesothulas turned to him, forcefully ripped open the sealed subspace pocket holding Tarantulas's vocalizer, and snarled, "The frag you looking at? _Keep driving_." He took off.)

Slowly, Prowl's trembling stopped, and he sagged against Mesothulas. Mesothulas rubbed Prowl’s back over his light bar, fighting to keep his own ventilations quiet so he could listen as Prowl's gradually slowed down.

At last, Prowl said, "So, anyway, regarding the current investigation—"

"Prowl!" Mesothulas smacked his back. "Of all the absurd— Don't push yourself!"

Prowl didn't say anything. But he gave Mesothulas a look that said, _I'm gonna_.

Mesothulas sighed, leaning forward to bump Prowl's helm again. "Fine. If you insist, then _I_ insist that you start with what in the world happened in there. What do you mean, something wanted you dead? Was there actual—actual physical activity? Were you attacked?"

"No, it was the... the _murder scene_ feeling. But much stronger. Not like something had been killed, but like the—like the—" He released one hand from around his knees so he could curl it like a claw, grasping at the air over his own chest. "Like—it was—trying to—_force_ death on me." He wrapped his arm tight around himself again. "To be absolutely, perfectly clear: I am _not_ ruling out the possibility that it's still just some unusual EM frequency that _happens_ to set off 'something is trying to kill you' vibes in the average Cybertronian's system. However: 'it might just be an EM frequency' is speculation. 'It _feels_ like something wanted me dead' is a factual statement of my experience."

Mesothulas held him tighter. "Did you turn off your door sensors?"

Prowl nodded jerkily. "That reduced it, but only momentarily."

"Why did you _stay_ there? Why didn't you, just—leave? Or comm me to come get you?"

"Two reasons. One: it didn't actually _do_ anything. Nothing moved. There were no weird lights. No electronics misbehaved. All my internal system readings remained constant. I stood there for several hours," (Mesothulas made a strangled squeak), "and it did nothing but steadily inform me that I ought to be dying. It took no action at all." He hesitated. "Two? I was— Did you know that when people talk about 'fight-or-flight' coding, there's actually a third option nobody mentions called 'freeze'?"

Mesothulas had heard enough. "Okay. We're going home."

Prowl started shaking his head.

"Yes. Home now. It's going home time."

"No."

"Do _not_ go back to that apartment."

"I'm going to."

"_Why?!_"

"_Because_," Prowl said, "we have an investigation we need to do and a mystery that needs to be solved. If the—the _whatever_ that is in there is doing this to me on our _third night_, what's it doing to everyone _else_ in that apartment? The Seekers' nightmares sound almost _exactly_ like what I felt—how long have they been putting up with that? I am _not_ leaving them stuck like that."

Mesothulas sighed, defeated. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Prowl didn't do this just for the curiosity of untangling strange phenomena. He couldn't maintain Mesothulas's objective distance. He had to be _noble_.

Oh, well. Would he be Prowl if he didn't? "Fine, fine. _You_ go home. Whatever's in there, either I can't sense it or it isn't interested in me yet. We'll keep in comm contact, and I'll do whatever you think needs doing. Give me a to-do list, go home, and _sleep_."

Prowl grumbled. But said, "Fine."

Mesothulas stood, and helped Prowl to his feet.

###

Despite Prowl’s acquiescence, he _insisted_ that Mesothulas tell him if he had anything that needed to be done outside of the fliers' apartment that Prowl could take care of for him. Mesothulas yelled at him, but they were over comms and Prowl was already driving, so Mesothulas couldn't physically shake some sense into him. So eventually, he caved and gave Prowl two things to do.

First, he needed Prowl to look up all the speculation and simulations he could find on the EM fields of untethered sparks, because at that point they had more evidence pointing toward an untethered spark than toward any other explanation. Barring, perhaps, "a very complex tangle of mass hysteria and a very localized, as-yet-unidentified EM phenomenon that gives off readings identical to a dying spark and causes a wide array of malfunctions and hallucinations that happen to resemble activity usually associated with hauntings." But, keeping Occam’s razor in mind, right now Mesothulas felt like they should be lending some credence to the "untethered spark" theory.

Which was, of course, just a more scientific-sounding synonym for "ghost."

Prowl didn't like that they were now just shy of using the word “ghost.” Mesothulas did. Mesothulas was giddy. _Slightly_ giddy. Approximately 55% giddy. He'd be giddier if this damn ghost hadn't just done its level best to scare the living slag out of his muse.

Second, Mesothulas needed Prowl to go back to Ratchet and ask for a second spark scanner they could borrow. Because if Prowl _did_ eventually come back to the apartment (and, in his spark, Mesothulas knew that it was only a matter of time until he did), it would be best if they both had one. They couldn't keep Mesothulas's homemade EMF meter with them at all times. Spark scanners were the best option they had.

But then, Mesothulas insisted, _then_ Prowl had to go home and _actually recharge_.

Prowl promised he would.

###

Ratchet was not happy to see Prowl. He was _very_ not happy about his medical equipment being used to look for ghosts. He was _extremely_ not happy that Prowl wanted to use _more_ of his medical equipment. And he wanted Prowl to know all about it.

Prowl summoned up what little patience his strut-deep mental and emotional exhaustion left him with, and asked, "So is that a 'no, you can't have one,' or a 'yes, but I'm going to be angry about it,' because I'm _very_ tired and would like to skip to the point."

"I've got an article to show you."

Prowl took a deep vent in, attempted to alchemize more patience out of thin air, and walked forward to look at Ratchet's computer.

"Look. Look at this. You made the local news."

Prowl leaned forward, read a few lines, and grimaced. There was a tiny story written up about their meeting in the apartment last night. Somebody there must have described it to the press. Now that Prowl thought about it, he vaguely remembered blowing off a ping asking for a statement sometime in the middle of his multi-hour, possibly-ghost-induced panic attack. He and Mesothulas were in and out of the news with some regularity, but usually it was "local paranormal investigators debunk yet another Iaconian urban legend." Something to be proud of. Not "ghost hunters call together an entire damn apartment building to ask them about what spooky things they've seen lately; decline to offer comment on proceedings."

"Great," Prowl said shortly. "I'll let Mesothulas know. So, about the scanner." If he had to ask one more time, he was going to pass out at Ratchet's feet and wake up strapped to a medical berth.

Ratchet gave him a glare that could melt steel, but held out a scanner that was considerably grubbier than the one they'd grabbed a couple days ago. "I had _better_ not end up associated with all this nonsense."

"If anyone asks about our supplier, I'll conveniently forget your name." Prowl escaped into the hall before Ratchet could start up another lecture about how ghosts weren’t real.

Prowl kept his gaze down and optics half-shuttered, trying to block out the bright hospital lights reflecting off the floor. He could still faintly feel a chill clinging to his spark—and on top of that, he was getting a headache. He had his processor fans up at top speed, which were no help whatsoever. He wondered if he could get away with taking the subway home, where it was dark—his wheels folded away in alt-mode. Maybe people who couldn’t differentiate his frame model’s various kibble options would mistake him for a boat and excuse him for not driving. But then it would take him even longer to get home, and if his headache got any worse, then the subway starting and stopping would probably exacerbate it—

"Whoa, hey! Stop!"

Prowl froze, gaze shooting up. He'd been focused so hard on the floor that he wasn't watching where he was going. He'd stopped inches from walking straight into—

"Tumbler?!" _How did Prowl keep running into him_. This was not fair. He quickly backpedaled. "What are _you_ doing here?"

Tumbler stared at him. "This... this is a hospital. I'm a mnemo_surgeon_. I—I work here."

"Oh. Right. Yes, of course, you told me— Sorry." He turned off his optics and pinched his nasal guard between his fingers. "I'm tired. Mesothulas and I have been up basically all night the last, uh... thhhree nights, now?"

Tumbler was silent.

Prowl turned an optic back on to see if Tumbler had left. He hadn't. He was staring at Prowl. Prowl replayed his last few words, trying to figure out why— "Ghosts! Up hunting ghosts! Not—" Where was that ghost? Prowl was ready to die now. "Anyway! How's uhh, _uhhhh_, Swivel!"

Tumbler continued staring at him.

Prowl tried again. "No, it started with a P, uh—Pirouette?"

"Pivot?"

"_Pivot!_"

Tumbler shifted his weight awkwardly. "We, uh. Broke up."

Prowl opened his mouth. No words came out. He waited for words to happen. "... Right. I'm going to leave." Before he had to go back to Ratchet's office for help removing his foot from his mouth.

"Uh—"

Prowl walked around Tumbler.

He drove home, looked up every single article he could that mentioned "untethered sparks" or "ghosts" in conjunction with the phrase "EM fields," bundled it into one file, commed it to Mesothulas, and passed out.

###

"What happened?"

Mesothulas stared at Starscream. He hadn't said anything _had_ happened, just that he was going to be running the investigation himself today.

"Oh, don't give me that look," Starscream snapped. "I've been dealing with this thing longer than anyone else. What is it? He isn't injured, is he?"

"No! No, absolutely not. If he was, I'd be with _him_, not here."

Mesothulas immediately knew he'd said just slightly too much, as Starscream's optics brightened in realization. "But—no," he went on quickly. "Unnerved, I think—and tired. He can't go very long without recharging."

Starscream nodded slightly, looking considering. "Hm." After a moment of silence, he said, "You know... if it's targeting _you two_ now—I can't, in good conscience, ask you to keep investigating this case. This is my problem. And, if nothing else, I'm used to my ghost." He smiled wanly. "I'd pay you your full fee, of course. You've been here three nights, and it's not that you haven't been going above and beyond to do your job. But, under the circumstances..."

Mesothulas didn't believe for a second that Starscream's offer was based on his conscience. In fact, he didn't think Starscream _wanted_ him to believe it was. It was essentially an excuse for him to give Mesothulas the offer.

And it was tempting. _Primus_, it was tempting, thinking about Prowl's face this morning. Who cared _why_ Starscream was making the offer, if it meant Mesothulas wouldn't have to see Prowl make that face again? But...

"That's generous of you," Mesothulas said. "But Prowl wouldn't agree. We discussed it this morning, and _he_ can't in good conscience leave you three here to deal with this phenomenon while there's anything we can do to help."

"Really? How _noble_ of him." Starscream sounded faintly disgusted.

Mesothulas shrugged. "I'm afraid it's one of his defining character traits. One of his few flaws, really. But—_I'll_ keep your offer in mind."

Starscream nodded, but still looked dissatisfied. "Prowl won't accept it, though, will he? Not for his _own_ sake."

Something about that question made Mesothulas deeply uncomfortable. "I—I doubt it, no."

He didn't like the look Starscream gave him.

###

Prowl had given Mesothulas one task: talk to the property manager and get the apartment's security footage. Last night, they had received a long list of dates, vague times, and locations from people who had had strange experiences, and Prowl wanted to go over the footage to see if any of the events that occurred in the building's hallways and stairwells had been recorded. Even if all that it "recorded" was distortion. Whatever this thing was, it messed with electronics, so Prowl was prepared for it to do anything to a camera.

After wheedling and begging the property manager for access to the footage, Mesothulas struck a bargain with him: Mesothulas would help him pirate the next building over's cable, in exchange for footage of the dates and times he needed. While the property manager pulled up the footage, Mesothulas drove to a nearby parts store and got the pieces he needed to jury rig together a device to wirelessly patch into the neighbor's cable.

Once Mesothulas had finished his job, received the footage, and sent it to Prowl—with a stern note not to watch any of it until _after_ he'd gotten adequate sleep—he went down to the lobby, cracked open the spark scanner he had on hand, and started modifying it with a few other pieces he'd picked up from the electronics store. There was absolutely no reason why this thing needed to be restricted to only pick up the narrow range of frequencies given off by sparks when Mesothulas had the knowledge to expand its range and the materials to improve it were so much easier to get these days. Upgrading it would be a cinch.

As he worked, he transferred Prowl's file full of studies to a datapad and scrolled through them idly. Half of them were completely irrelevant—articles about completely unrelated subjects that had only made it into the search because they included a passing mention to an EM field and the phrase "a ghost of a chance" or some similar combination. Prowl really didn't winnow any of these down before sending them, did he? He was probably too tired. Poor thing. Mesothulas was _glad_ he'd spent as little time as necessary before going to sleep—but he was usually so meticulous in his work. Just thinking about how exhausted he must have gotten before he was willing to let his usual standards slide...

And they had an out, now, if they wanted it. With no loss to them. Prowl wouldn't like it, of course, but— Mesothulas was still tempted. Not just for Prowl's sake, but because it was becoming increasingly clear that Starscream didn't _want_ them to get rid of the ghost. Why? Had he grown to like having it around, perhaps? Starscream didn't even seem to be friends with his own roommates; maybe the ghost was the closest thing he had to a companion. But if that was the case, why had he gone to "Mortilus" for help getting rid of it...?

Mesothulas had been alternating between upgrading the spark scanner and reading the articles for about an hour when Thundercracker came down to the lobby, hesitated in the stairwell doorway, and made a beeline for Mesothulas. "Hey," he said quietly, taking a chair. "I need to talk to you without the others around. I don't want Starscream and Warp to hear, and—I'm not gonna talk about it in front of the _ex-cop_, you know? No offense, I'm sure he's okay, but... Is that alright?"

Mesothulas opened a new text file on his datapad, set aside his tools, and gave Thundercracker his full attention. "Whatever it is, it's safe with me." He was lying completely. There wasn't the slightest chance he wasn't going to tell Prowl.

Thundercracker spoke quickly, like he was trying to get his message out before somebody caught him sharing it. ”Okay, so, we _know_ that this ghost is attached to Starscream, right? And he thinks it came from that political rally in Vos where somebody died. But he _didn't_ explain why he thinks that some random bot at the rally might've latched on to _him_. And there's always a _reason_, right? Like, ghosts don't just latch on to total strangers."

Hell, if this was a real ghost, all bets were off. But Mesothulas nodded encouragingly. "That's generally true, yes."

"Here's the thing," Thundercracker said, voice low. "I think Starscream might've killed the guy haunting him. _That's_ why he's been so reluctant to talk about that rally, or the haunting. That's why he was so desperate to get rid of it that he flew off to Kaon to talk to some guy calling himself the god of death. That's why the dead thing keeps radiating doom and gloom vibes everywhere. Starscream's always been secretive about what his life was like in Vos—he probably _caused_ the explosion at the political rally. It'd all make sense, right?"

Mesothulas nodded slowly. "That _would_ all line up..." He considered the look that Starscream had given him earlier when he’d said Prowl wouldn't back down. Did that look like a mech capable of killing?

"And, listen," Thundercracker said, "Warp and I do _not_ want Starscream to get arrested. That's not what we're going for. Rent would be hell without him. But—if he _did_ kill the ghost—that'd give it a motive for the haunting, right? That might be something you need to know if you're gonna, y'know, exorcise it."

"Yyyes, that _would_ certainly complicate things..." More than Thundercracker could imagine. Here Mesothulas had stumbled upon a potential murder, and Prowl was asleep. "Great! Great. Thank you for the information. That's. That will—give us quite a bit to explore."

"Sure." Thundercracker smiled shakily. "Just don't tell Starscream we had this conversation, okay?"

"I wouldn't dream of it."

Thundercracker gave him two thumbs up and headed back to the stairs.

Mesothulas stared blankly at Ratchet's disassembled spark scanner.

Okay. Prowl wasn't here to grouse about it, so Mesothulas was going to take a leap of faith, stop thinking like a ghost debunker, and start thinking like a ghostbuster. What do you do when you think you've got a ghost and you need to deal with it? (This was kind of exciting. He'd always wanted to do this but never gotten this far.) Generally, you had to start by finding out who the ghost _was_, right? The "political rally" story might be bogus, but it was just weird enough that it might be true. He'd start there.

Under the pretense of double-checking that the cable pirating device wasn’t detectable, he borrowed the property manager's computer to look up old news articles about political events in Vos, searching for any that might have ended badly.

Early in the evening, after several hours of digging, he found one.

He read the relevant articles. He looked at the pictures. His optics widened.

He called Prowl.

"_Prowl_—I need you to call in a favor," he hissed. "We need Starscream's records. Whatever you can get—batch number, service records, anything. I think I've just solved sixty percent of this entire case."

###

By late afternoon, although Prowl was still tired, he was _more_ tired of not being useful. Mesothulas couldn't scold him for doing something productive if he was still technically on the recharge slab while he was doing it, right? He went downstairs, grabbed a computer, carried it up, and flopped down on the slab again. The security camera footage wasn't going to watch itself.

He watched several clips of supposed moments of paranormal activity without seeing anything out of the usual.

Then stopped.

And stared.

And watched several other clips.

He called Mesothulas.

"Can y— ah." Never mind, Mesothulas called _him_. "I'll get you your records if you get me a bit more footage. I think I've got your missing forty percent." He sent Mesothulas ten seconds of film.

Mesothulas sent him an obituary. “And _I_ think we've got our ghost."

###

"You don't think this is... excessive?" Starscream asked, looking with concern at all the cameras set up around the living room.

"On the contrary!" Mesothulas balanced on the living room's sole armchair to tape a motion sensor to the ceiling over the recharge room doorframe. "Given the off-the-charts level of the poltergeist phenomenon you've been experiencing, this is the _exact _level of monitoring we need if we want to be sure to catch evidence of the spirit in action."

Starscream nodded at the motion sensor. "Can these things even _sense_ ghosts?"

"Well, it depends on the ghosts." Mesothulas hopped off the chair, dragged it across the room, and set up another sensor over the front door. "I've even brought a spirit box of my own design, _just_ for the occasion."

"A _what_?"

Mesothulas flipped on a device that looked like a blocky comm unit, sitting on a spot he'd carefully cleared on the living room table. It spat out stuttery white noise and occasional random slivers of words, which were displayed on a scrolling screen at the bottom of the spirit box: "**. . . LI . . . . G . . W . O TH . . . . . . . . M . .**"

Over the noise, he said, "There are thousands upon thousands of unlocked comm frequencies traveling through the air at any given time. All with conversations, radio stations, music, government broadcasts, PSAs, traffic reports... A spirit box is designed to randomly bounce between stations multiple times a second. The theory is that a ghost can use its EM field to directly interact with the spirit box’s internal random number generator to choose which stations it bounces to, in order to pick out syllables and construct words—possibly even sentences."

"Uh-_huh_." Starscream regarded the box and its gibberish dubiously. "And I suppose the ghost just knows what's being said on every channel at once so it knows what to pick? That's just a thing that ghosts do?"

Mesothulas hesitated, turning the box off. "Well—that _is_ the theory. Truth be told, I've never seen a spirit powerful enough for me to try this out on."

"It sounds reasonable," Thundercracker said from the doorway to the recharge room. "I mean—the science is all there, right?" Behind him, Skywarp shrugged and nodded.

Mesothulas died inside a little.

Starscream grunted, but didn't complain. "So is it just you tonight?"

"I'm afraid so. Prowl and I thought it best that he get a proper night's recharge, all things considered. I do hope he'll be back tomorrow, though."

"Hm." Starscream watched Mesothulas plug the long cord stretching from a camera that had been set up outside the room into a small TV screen; then he turned toward the recharge room. "Hopefully." The door slid open. "Remember, _no_ monitoring in here."

"Your recharge room's privacy is secure, I assure you."

"Good." The door slid shut behind Starscream.

###

For the first hour of the night, all was quiet. Mesothulas stared at the screen displaying the feeds from the cameras around the room for so long that his vision started pixelating. He rubbed his optics, tried to focus on the screen, and sighed.

The screen went black.

Mesothulas sat up straight.

He reset his optics a couple of times, as though he thought _they'd_ gone dark, and then picked up the screen to see if the plug connecting it to the camera had come loose. He immediately dropped it. The screen was ice cold. "What the—?"

Something cold pressed into his back, through the armor, and moved over his spark. The faster his spark spun, the more he could feel the force weighing down. It was _telling_ him something; he could feel a message manifesting in his mind.

And if he _hadn't_ felt it, he would have heard it anyway. The spirit box snapped on by itself, stuttering static as it flipped through the stations. Over the static, clear and unmistakable, a voice growled several words that scrolled along the box's display: "**. . GET . OUT . . . GET . OUT . . OR . ELSE .**"

Oh, hm. It _really_ shouldn't be able to do that. Mesothulas nearly bolted for the door, not quite out of fear but under the compulsion of the command manifesting directly within his mind. He shook his head, squeezing the chair's armrests to keep from running. "N-no, I can't—Prowl—"

The TV screen turned back on; it was all black static, with two white eyes. "**HE S . . N E X T .**"

Mesothulas's spark _did_ stop spinning. Prowl. "... No."

(For a terrifying moment, compressed in a cold grip as he was, he was afraid his spark wouldn't start spinning again. But of course it did.)

"**. . . YOU . HAD . . YOUR . CHANCE .**"

The force vanished, and he stood there, trembling.

The spirit box shrieked; its display scrolled a random feed of A's and I's. There was a pop over the front door—Mesothulas stood and whirled to face it. A shower of sparks rained from the motion sensor. And with another pop, the other motion sensor was gone too.

Mesothulas opened a comm line. "Prowl—" The spirit box shrieked again; and the cameras squealed, internal electrical components twisting out of shape, ribbons of electricity curving along their seams and arcing between the machines. They died with whines, sputtering sparks and smoke. One behind Mesothulas exploded. He gasped, crouching and shielding his head. "_Prowl!_"

The bookcases shuddered around him, making the floor tremble so hard that the table with all its empty cubes rattled as well. Mesothulas had to scramble back against a wall to avoid a falling bookcase. Two guns slid off their shelves, turned in midair, and pointed at him. Despite the fact that they had no internal power source—they were designed to plug into a soldier's arms for power—they lit up. Over the hissing of burned-out electronics and the ever-louder screeching of the spirit box, Mesothulas could hear them charging. He pressed his forearms over his head and hoped they'd aim for his spark. "_Now would be nice!_"

The door crumpled open. Prowl soared into the room with a flying kick, landed on the fallen bookcase, ended up stuck awkwardly on his shoulder with his legs in the air, and with a wild kick took out one of the guns. It twirled away, crashed into a wall, and landed on the floor. The living room lights flashed on, as though in surprise, and then every light and electronic went dark.

"C—" Prowl managed to flop to the floor. His headlights swung wildly around the dark room. "Come on!" He offered Mesothulas a hand up and they scrambled over the bookcase to the recharge room door.

"What took you?!"

"There were a lot of stairs!"

"Were you in the _lobby?!_"

"Where was I _supposed_ to be?" He tried to open the door manually, jerked back from the cold, and got it open with two kicks.

His headlights illuminated three sleeping forms—blue, purple, and gray—and he snapped the lights on. Still working in this room, fortunately. "Everyone up!" Prowl barked. Thundercracker flinched and groaned; Skywarp flung an arm over his optics. He and Mesothulas physically yanked the two of them off their recharge slab, despite their yelps and flailing, and once they were both standing, Mesothulas pointed at Starscream on the pallet. "_There's_ your ghost!”

Laying curled up on the pallet, paint gray and biolights black, was a corpse.

Skywarp gasped in horror and stumbled away from it, but they were still connected by a power cable, which jerked the corpse closer to Skywarp. He yanked at the cable twisting under his arm in a blind panic, and Thundercracker had to help unlatch it from Skywarp's back with trembling hands. "Oh, god—oh Primus."

"We were right," Prowl muttered to Mesothulas. "I was worried we were about to look really stupid." Mesothulas found his hand and quickly squeezed it.

Skywarp was leaning on a wall for support, hand on his chest, staring with wide eyes at the body. Thundercracker slowly sank to his knees in front of the pallet, looking over the body like he was searching for wounds. Prowl and Mesothulas waited for them to recover enough to ask the inevitable questions.

It took Prowl and Mesothulas a moment to realize that the noise in the living room had ceased. Everything was still, and the spirit box was silent.

From the doorway behind them, the corpse's voice said, "Aw, _slag._"

They all spun toward the door. Prowl automatically stepped half in front of Mesothulas, arm stretched out protectively.

In the doorway, floating at chest height, was a tiny ball of clear blue-white light. Surrounding it was the translucent illusion of a person—like clear glass faintly painted in blue and red and white, or like a hologram that hadn't finished forming. Between the outlines, the blackness of the dark living room was clearly visible. Tiny sparkling shimmers traced the edges of the specter's extremities—fingertips, wing tips, face and optics.

Thundercracker made a high-pitched wheezing noise.

The ghost sighed heavily. "All right. Okay," Starscream said. "What gave me away? I thought I'd been doing pretty good."

Mesothulas leaned forward against Prowl. "Thank you _so_ much for asking, I was hoping you would! Prowl, Prowl, show him the footage."

"This is so dramatic," Prowl muttered, but nevertheless slid out a datapad and held it up, facing it toward the ghost. Starscream walked closer, feet pressing noiselessly into the junk on the floor as though it wasn't there. "Exhibit one: security camera footage we obtained earlier today." Thundercracker and Skywarp had barely taken their optics off Starscream since he’d come in, but they leaned over in an attempt to see the datapad too.

The clip Prowl played clearly showed what Starscream had described as the "ghost" he'd seen: a small, round, horned yellow car, carrying a box and setting it in front of a door. Prowl pulled back the datapad and switched clips to show one of the car walking into the lobby with the package. "He's a delivery bot. That's why everyone's seen him around the building but nobody knows who he is. You clearly _knew_ that, and described him as the ghost in the hope that everyone would vaguely remember seeing him but not why. You saw a crowd of bots already in a state of heightened suggestibility and took advantage of it.”

"Exhibit two!" Mesothulas said, as Prowl took back the datapad to switch screens. "I found that _political rally_ you mentioned," with finger quotes, "'Starscream.'"

And Starscream said, softly, but with feeling, "Oh, frag me."

"You didn't mention that the big disaster at the rally was a riot started over accusations that the local precinct senator was embezzling tax money," Mesothulas said; "a riot that ended when a disgruntled citizen threw a homemade grenade that assassinated the senator." At Mesothulas's nudging, Prowl held out the datapad again, now displaying an obituary. Skywarp and Thundercracker—who’d been quietly edging around the room to try to see the datapad better without getting nearer Starscream’s ghost—leaned in to see. "Check out this picture of the assassinated senator. Even for a cold constructed frame, he looks rather familiar, doesn't he?"

Starscream cringed.

"We ran a background check on you," Prowl added. "Your earliest records appear after the death of the senator—shortly after his body was reported 'stolen.'"

"For what it's worth," Mesothulas went on, "I, personally, appreciate the value of renaming yourself after a violent rebirth; and 'Starscream of Vos' is a _vast_ improvement over 'Senator Ulchtar.'"

Aghast, Thundercracker said, "Your name was Ulchtar? _Ulchtar?_ Like... like _Ulchtar?_"

Skywarp elbowed him hard. "Is _that_ what you took away from this?" He turned to Starscream's ghost. "No, but seriously, your name was _Ulchtar?_"

Through gritted incorporeal teeth, he muttered, "There _is_ a reason I _changed_ it."

"We've answered your question, Starscream," Prowl said. "Now we've got two for you. Let's start with, how do you even _do_ this?" He gestured at the cold gray body lying next to the recharge slab.

Starscream cackled. "Do you think _I_ know?! I had no idea I _could_ until I got a bottle bomb to the face and discovered I was standing over my own corpse! But I've been able to do it ever since. Bounce in and out of my body, _any_ time I want." He paused. "Reentry's a pain, though." He glanced at Skywarp and Thundercracker. "Sorry for the recurring trapped-in-a-corpse nightmare, bots. I'm pretty sure it's a side effect of being downstream from my corpse on the daisy chain."

Thundercracker threw his hands up in disbelief. Skywarp said, "Those dreams are _traumatizing_, mech! You mean we could've avoided them just by putting _you_ on the pallet every night?!"

"Yes," Starscream said, "but I didn't _want_ to sleep on the pallet."

"Okay," Mesothulas said, "you don't know the details behind your abilities, that's fair. This is worth a whole lot of scientific examination. That can come later."

Prowl said, "After the trial, probably."

Starscream's translucent eyes went a little wider.

"Question two," Prowl said. "You were never haunted. Why did you tell Jazz you were? Why are we even here when you obviously didn't want the paranormal activity in this apartment investigated?"

"I got arrested for showing up at that cult," Starscream muttered. "I had to say _something_ that sounded plausible. I had roommates that could back up my story, _they_ thought we were haunted."

"We _were_ haunted, you—!" Skywarp picked up a fake crown and chucked it at Starscream. It sailed straight through him and hit the ground with a crackle of static. "_You_ were haunting us! Primus below! That— That's—!" Skywarp looked at Thundercracker. "Come on! Right?!”

Thundercracker had, over the past couple of minutes, slowly slid down to squat on the ground. "Honestly," he said, "I'm just glad Starscream didn't murder somebody. Embezzling's fine."

"Thundercracker, _nobody cares_ about the embezzling, what the _hell_—"

Mesothulas cut in, "Why _were_ you at Overlord's performance, then? Surely you didn't _actually_ think he was Mortilus?"

"Hell no! Hah! I was there to _upstage_ him! Show the crowd what a _real_ master over death looks like!" He spread his arms wide, and with a slight hop, effortlessly floated into the air, glowing and glimmering. "What's a cheap magician's saw-a-mech-in-half parlor trick next to an untethered spark stepping outside its mortal shell and then bringing it back to life? I could have _had_ that cult! Led _hundreds_ of devoted worshipers. Imagine that power! What's a local politician next to a god?!"

He pointed down at Prowl and Mesothulas. "But _you two_ just _had_ to show up with the Prime and all his little friends, and _now_ you had to come in and ruin things for me here! And when I'm back, there's going to be _hell to pay_ for you two."

Prowl nearly laughed. "'When you're back'? Where exactly do you plan on _going_? Almost everyone here that's reported _anything_ supernatural happening to them, including your own roommates, has mentioned objects disappearing. You've obviously been stealing them. You’d be under arrest for that alone. Plus," he waved the datapad, "once we can confirm that you're Ulchtar, you've got a hell of a charge for embezzling."

"Oh, and I suppose you plan on arresting a corpse? Or do those little EMF meters you've been waving everywhere come with a 'catch disembodied spark' extension?"

Prowl looked hopefully at Mesothulas. He shook his head. "Still in the blueprints stage. We never had an immediate need for it."

"Hm." Prowl looked back at Starscream. "Well, we're definitely going to arrest your corpse."

"Nuh-uh."

"Yuh-huh." Mesothulas grinned. "You see, there are _special_ prisons built just for corpses. They're called... morgues."

Starscream opened his mouth. And then closed it.

Mesothulas tapped Prowl's thigh compartment to tell him to open up and pulled out the second spark scanner Ratchet had loaned them. "Every time our spark scanner picks you up, it claims that you’re actively dying." He pointed it at Starscream and nodded. "Just under six hours until you fade, it says. Now, maybe that reading is just a side effect of your _unique_ ability to untether your spark from your frame, but I've got another theory: you can't last long outside your body. _Eventually_, you have to come home. So you can run, if you want—but sooner or later you're going to find yourself kicking at the inside of a morgue drawer, asking to be let out, and from there it's a short drive to a proper cell."

"You're getting locked up, Starscream," Prowl said. "Either all at once, or one piece at a time. What's it going to be?"

Starscream looked between them, considering that.

And then he disappeared.

Every single loose item in the recharge room leaped into the air, hovered threateningly, and then started pelting them.

Mesothulas squawked in alarm, dropped to the ground, and curled into a ball. Prowl crouched over him, arms wrapped around his shoulders and head.

Through the maelstrom, Skywarp yelled, "I've got this! I've got it!" He waded through the assault with Thundercracker clinging to his shoulders and hiding his face in his back. He knelt down, grabbed Starscream's corpse's leg with one hand and Prowl's door with the other—

And with a lurch, a feeling like being sucked through a tiny tube, and a zooming-popping sound, they were outside the building.

Prowl gaped at the sky above them. "What in the...?"

"Holy—" Mesothulas looked around wildly, looked at Skywarp, and said, "You? What?"

"Yeah, I can teleport."

"How? You? What? _What?_" With each word, Mesothulas's voice got higher.

Skywarp shrugged. "My name is Skywarp, I mean..."

Thundercracker stood on shaky legs, shuffled around next to Mesothulas, and knelt again. "And I can spontaneously generate sonic booms without breaking the sound barrier."

"_What?!_"

He beamed. "Nobody's ever impressed by that."

"Jhiaxian Academy night classes," Skywarp said. "Hey, pro tip—you ever meet a student from the night classes, it means they can do something weird. Academy likes to use the term 'outliers.' Not as cool as, like, 'bots with superpowers,' but."

"Hey, you know what?" Thundercracker said. "I bet that's why Starscream kept dropping hints about wanting to get in on the night classes, even after we told him. I thought he was just being clingy about wanting to go to class with other fliers, but..."

"Oh, spawn of a _glitch_. No _wonder_."

Prowl gingerly lay down on the sidewalk. Mesothulas looked at him. "Are you—?"

"I just teleported. Give me a minute."

Skywarp had dropped them in a train station, so once everyone other than Skywarp had recovered from the post-teleportation shakiness, they scooped up the trash that had accidentally come along from the apartment and relocated to a couple of benches. Skywarp and Thundercracker propped up Starscream's body between them, slung his arms around their shoulders, and tried to get his head to sit at a natural angle.

Prowl tried not to watch as he made a comm. ”Flatfoot? This is Prowl. I— Yes, I know what time it is— This is _business_, not— Flatfoot, I've got a dead body." Prowl paused. "I should _hope_ you're awake. Listen, I'm calling you because I need mechaforensics to get here before the enforcers, because I've got some _very_ specific requests to make about how this body is to be contained. Ye— Yes, 'contained.' As in 'locked up so it can't escape.' No, I'm n— _Yes_, the body is currently dead, I— yes, 'currently,' bu— Let me _finish!_"

Mesothulas had been watching Starscream's body with naked longing while Skywarp and Thundercracker messed with it. (It was now wearing a dented crown and a pair of safety goggles. A passerby stared at them. Thundercracker picked up Starscream's arm and used it to wave at him. He hurried by.) "Prowl," Mesothulas hissed. "Before mechaforensics gets him, can I dissect his spark chamber? Please, please, please, please, please—"

“Fine," Prowl whispered. "Just take lots of pictures and close it when IMD gets here."

"Camera?"

Prowl searched his subspace pockets. To Flatfoot, he said, "Okay, first, I need you to _not_ give it an autopsy for several days. It— _No_, I'm not an imposter pretending to be Prowl; who would want to pretend to be me? Don't be— Flatfoot— _Flatfoot_—" He found the camera and held it out distractedly.

Mesothulas claimed it and skipped over to the fliers' bench. "Do you mind if I take him apart a little bit? Nothing permanent, I promise. I'll put him right back together like he was."

"Hey, hold on," Thundercracker said. "Dissecting a chest isn't like disassembling a gun. They're not _nearly_ as easy to put back together as they look.” Skywarp gave Thundercracker a concerned look.

"I've got medical training."

"Oh." Both fliers looked at him in surprise, and then each other. "Yeah, that's all right then."

"Good for you. Motorcycle and all."

Mesothulas balanced himself on one knee between Starscream's legs to get close enough to examine him. "Alt-mode exempt. Truth be told, I don't really see myself as a motorcycle at all." He searched his unsealed subspace pockets for a toolkit, found a currency card first, shrugged, and used the edge of it to loosen the screws holding Starscream's canopy on. The fliers watched in fascination. “Anyway, anyone with two hands and a fast enough processor can make it as a doctor. I once met a flier with medical training. Fully credentialed—wearing the pluses and everything."

"Was it Pharma?" Skywarp asked. "_Every_ flier knows about Pharma. It's all 'oh, study hard, and maybe _you_ can be _just like Pharma_.’ It's obnoxious."

"Yeah, like, study's wasted on any flier that doesn't happen to be a medical genius with fancy hands like Pharma? What if I wanna go into TV?" Thundercracker gesticulated expressively with Starscream's hand as he spoke. "I don't think there's such a thing as an alt-mode specifically designed for sitting your aft in a director's seat, but say you're studying and all you get is 'oh, gonna be like Pharma'?"

"When I dropped out, I was about ready to punch the next person who said his name."

"Glad I didn't say it, then," Mesothulas muttered. He'd pried out Starscream’s canopy with the edge of the card, and was now using his fingertips to ease Starscream's spark casing to the front of his chest so he could look it over. It didn't _look_ remarkable from the outside. Perhaps something on the inside would reveal how his spark was so unusually durable? Mesothulas didn't have the time or tools to make incisions like that now, but he would _have_ to find a way to look in on it later. If he could find a way to _replicate_ Starscream's seemingly-invincible spark...

He could hear sirens approaching in the distance. "Ah, that's the end of that." He snapped a few quick pictures, nudged Starscream's spark casing back in place, shut the canopy, and hastily screwed it shut.

"Find what you were looking for?" Thundercracker asked.

"Not yet." Mesothulas shrugged, returning to his seat next to Prowl. "But, it was just a preliminary peek. I'm sure I'll have plenty more opportunities to examine it at my leisure once Starscream's locked up."

The fliers considered that silently.

"Huh," Thundercracker said.

"Guess so," Skywarp said.

Flashing lights were visible around a corner and coming closer. Prowl stood and went to greet mechaforensics.

###

"For the objects to have displayed the scatter patterns they did," Prowl said to the dozen enraptured enforcers sitting in on his interview, placing his elbow on the table to pantomime a falling bookcase with his forearm, "the bookcase would have had to fall to about a twenty degree angle, like so, pause until all its contents had spilled out, and _then_ been let go to fall the rest of the way. Which matched the trail of the untethered spark that we found over the bookcase. See, if you think of it like a pendulum, with each shelf assigning each object a different radius from center point, i.e., the floor—“

"Excuse me," an enforcer said, raising his hand.

Prowl pointed at him. "You're not the one interviewing me, but yes?"

"Did—did you _know_ it was a spark then, or...?"

"Of course not. But while in the room, we _did_ detect its spark type."

They murmured appreciatively.

###

"And then," Mesothulas said, to his audience of enforcers, "the camera exploded— No! Hey!" He pointed at an officer who'd started to laugh. "That wasn't a joke! I'm actually not exaggerating. It _literally_ exploded. You'll see when you get there; even if Starscream _has_ somehow managed to remove the camera, the room _reeks_ of the burnt electronics. Anyway—then the camera exploded, and—"

###

"Well," Mesothulas said cheerily, as they left the Iaconian precinct just before dawn, "everyone's going to be jealous of the night shift today."

"Nobody's ever jealous of the night shift," Prowl informed him. "Night shift is universally detested."

"No, no dear, I meant because night shift got to hear our testimony live.”

“Oh!” Prowl considered that. “… I think I’d prefer the recharge.”

“That’s the exhaustion speaking. But, yes, we really ought to recharge, oughtn’t we?”

"We should return Ratchet's spark scanners first,” Prowl said. They hadn’t even needed the second one, it’d only been used for dramatic effect. He could have spared himself the trip if he’d known. ”Do you want to come along, or—?"

"To see Ratchet? Not particularly." Mesothulas paused, and then brushed a hand on the back of Prowl's arm. "Unless _you_ want company...?"

"I'm fine now," Prowl said, because he was fairly certain that was what Mesothulas was really asking. "Are you?"

"Never better. Over the moons, in fact." Mesothulas seized Prowl's hands, startling him, then quickly let go with a glance around the street to make sure it was clear. "Can you _believe_ it?" he hissed. "_A real ghost!_ A genuine untethered spark! Wait until we publish _that_ paper!"

"Is he really a ghost, though?" Prowl asked. "He spends most of his time alive."

"He _did_ die, though."

"And came back to life."

"Did he? Or is he a ghost possessing an inanimate object that just happens to be his own corpse?"

Prowl considered that. "By that logic, aren't we _all_ ghosts possessing inanimate objects that happen to be our own corpses?"

"Well—" Mesothulas stopped. "We'll present our findings and leave the 'ghost' question to the philosophers."

"Agreed."

###

"This one's been _dissected_," Ratchet said, scowling at the spark scanner.

"No it h— ah." It very clearly had. "Sorry. I had to take a day off to catch up on recharge; he must have done that when I wasn't looking. I'm sure whatever he did to it upgraded it."

"Upgraded it? Look at it! It's a mess! It's—he cut it in pieces and glued it back together!"

"His upgrades usually look like that," Prowl said tiredly. "Look, I'm sorry, he shouldn't have messed with it. Do you want us to replace it?"

Ratchet stared at him. "Do you have any idea how much one of these costs?"

"No. So do you want us to replace it?"

Ratchet stared a moment longer; then he sighed and shook his head. "So? How'd your case go?"

"If I told you, you'd never speak to me again."

###

Prowl could have gone straight home. Would have quite liked to go straight home, in fact.

Instead, through sheer force of will, he made himself look up the hospital directory, find the wing where the mnemosurgeons were, and trudge over.

He crossed paths with the cultist whose brother had come with Tumbler to bail him out, what’s-his-name S-something-or-other ("Do I recognize you? I feel like I recognize you." "I was the assisting in the case against Overlord's cult." "Ah! Right, you. 'You're under arrest for attempted—for _successful_ murder,' hah." "Right. You're back at work? You work _here?_ I thought mnemosurgeons would have rules about..." "Oh, yeah, charges were dropped." "Ah." "Hey, good to see you! Tell your partner I said hi.") before he managed to find Tumbler's office. He stared at the nameplate by the door, frowning; but he double-checked the room number in the directory, and then knocked anyway.

"Come in." That was Tumbler's voice.

Prowl opened the door. "Hi."

"_Prowl?_"

"I wasn't sure you'd be here. Your name's in the hospital directory, but the nameplate..."

"Oh, yeah, s’new. Directory must not have changed it yet."

Prowl looked at the name by the door again and frowned.

"What are you doing here?" After a pause, Tumbler beckoned him in.

Prowl stepped one foot into the doorway, but no further. Tumbler's office was sparse, compared to how he'd kept their shared quarters and his cubicle in IMD, but his desk was as haphazard a pile of disorganized paperwork as it had ever been. Prowl was mildly disappointed med school hadn't neatened his habits. "I was coming by to return some equipment to Ratchet, so, I—thought I should apologize for my conduct yesterday."

For a moment, Tumbler stared at him. His optics flickered. But then he said, "_Oh!_ Oh! Yeah, right, _that_. No—don't worry about it. I know how you are."

For some reason that Prowl couldn't quite articulate, it stung that Tumbler thought he'd been so rude because he was just _like_ that, rather than because he'd been operating on a significant sleep deficit. But he couldn't think of any way to voice that without sounding like he was complaining that Tumbler _hadn't_ been bothered by his behavior—or any _reason_ to voice his discomfort that would lead to anything productive—so he pushed the feeling down. "Well. Anyway. I wanted to say what I _should_ have said yesterday if I'd been more thoughtful: I'm sorry to hear about you and Pivot."

Tumbler's optics flickered again. "Er—sorry, who?"

Prowl grimaced. "Did I get it wrong again? Pivot? Divot? Er—Private? Something like that?”

Tumbler just stared at him, then shrugged. "Who?"

Prowl couldn't be _that_ far off the name. And even if he was—they'd only talked about one person yesterday and it was very clear why Prowl would be sorry about him. His mouth worked uselessly a moment, trying to figure out what the hell the proper script was for a situation like this.

Finally, he pulled out a, "Sorry to bother you."

Tumbler nodded slowly. "Yeah, uh. Good to see you. You... getting enough sleep?"

"I think I could use some more." He stepped back, let the door slide shut, and looked again at the plaque next to it.

_Chromedome of Iacon_, huh. He almost wondered if he hadn't walked into the wrong office after all.

It was a relief to head home.

###

Mesothulas had told Prowl that he'd meet him at home. He hadn't said that he was going to head straight there.

When one was a jack-of-all-trades of a scientist with suitably high ambitions, eventually one's reach started to exceed both one's financial means and one's legal boundaries. Some of Mesothulas's work—an upgraded spark scanner here, a pirated cable channel there—could be done with cheap materials available at any electronics store. But his _masterworks_ needed certain equipment that simply wasn't available on the regular market.

His masterworks needed dead bodies.

Cold constructed parts were a dime a dozen, if you were okay with cheap. Mesothulas wasn't. It was a decent starting point, sure—there were several reasons why his latest project's base blueprints were based off of Prowl's frame model, and affection was only one of them. Whoever had designed the frame had been a medical genius. But no matter how flawless the _design_ was, the _parts_ were mass-produced with cheap materials. For a true masterpiece, he needed parts that were grown, not poured. Forged parts.

Some forged parts were easy enough to come by—he'd been swimming in spare joints when building his own legs; the only hard part was finding enough that matched—but others... weren't. Things like good hands. Or triplechanger t-cogs.

There were places, even in Iacon, where spare parts of people could be found. A couple of stores with interesting stock in the back if you knew what to ask for, bars with regulars that might do deals in back corners. Mesothulas hadn't had a chance to check out the market since reconsidering the scale of his masterpiece, and was hoping to find the local secondhand hand dealer at one of his favorite bars: a hole-in-the-wall that was unremarkable except for the fact that customers could order high grade with vintages that were listed not by cycle, but by hot spot.

Unfortunately, this early in the day, the bar was almost deserted, and neither the hand dealer nor any of his other favorite suppliers were there. _Fortunately_, his other favorite regular was, sitting at a table by himself and scrolling with his one hand through the morning news.

Mesothulas darted up to the bartender and hissed, "Make him another of whatever he's having, on me."

The bartender gave Mesothulas an unimpressed look. "He's having a basic low-grade ration."

"Well, get him _another_ one."

The bartender rolled his optics, but pulled out a small cube.

Mesothulas fidgeted next to the bar until it had been delivered, then swooped over and sat in the seat across from Shockwave. "Good morning. I wasn't expecting to see _you_ here so early."

"Did you order this cube?"

"Uh—yes, I did."

"I don't want it. I've already had my ration."

"Well, you can save it for tomorrow."

"Hm." Shockwave clicked its lid shut, stowed it away, and picked his datapad back up. "It's good you're here. I have been meaning to thank you for nearly luring me into a sting operation."

"_Nearly_. You _did_ get away.”

"After being warned at the last possible second, yes."

"Sure, but what an experience you got to have! You even got to meet an untethered spark."

"Did I."

"Quite so. You recall that flier you were speaking to before I came up?"

Shockwave slowly lowered his datapad. "He seemed _quite_ tethered when I saw him."

"Oh, it's a temporary state, I assure you." Mesothulas leaned forward, whispering, "I _know_ that you'll appreciate how revolutionary this is to the field of scintillology—a spark that can maintain itself, with its identity intact and advanced abilities to move and interact with its environment, without the support of a frame, for hours. He can pop in and out of his body at will. Or—his spark can pop in and out of _him_ at will, depending on where you personally believe the self is rooted." Mesothulas waved off the technicality.

"And what of his body, when he's out of it?"

"Quite dead."

Shockwave slowly sat back. "... Forged or cold constructed?"

"Cold constructed. He goes by Starscream of Vos now, but _used_ to go by Ulchtar."

Shockwave's head tipped up. "I thought the flier’s voice was familiar."

"Oh, did you know the senator?"

"Unfortunately." Shockwave leaned in again. "This is indeed _quite_ the revolutionary finding. Thank you for sharing it with me."

Mesothulas could have happily melted on the spot.

###

When Prowl got home, he passed out for a couple of hours, got up to type up some preliminary notes on the case and shower, and passed right back out.

Mesothulas didn't. He was wired. He had to read everything that had ever been written about untethered sparks, tear himself up dreaming of ways to replicate Starscream's ability to live without a body, and haphazardly try and fail to expand on Prowl's case notes in any sort of meaningful way.

Nightfall had long since fallen unnoticed and midnight had zoomed by before he was shaken from his trance by the realization that he was 1) several pages deep into a bogus article about how ritual sacrifice could rejuvenate the spark, and 2) not registering a single word he was reading.

Teetering with exhaustion, Mesothulas dragged himself upstairs and staggered through the discarded datapads and unfinished projects on the floor to slide onto the recharge slab next to Prowl. Propping himself up on an elbow, he traced a hand up the cable snaking from the slab into Prowl, and ran a finger around the rim of the cable where it connected to Prowl's back. Static tingled his fingertip.

Prowl shivered. Half-coherent, he mumbled, "Mesatulas? What time'sit?"

"Oh, Prowl," he breathed, pressing his forehead to the crook of Prowl's neck. “Tonight I have been wallowing in the occult and the macabre. How _sublime_ the dark shadows of our universe can be—you have no idea! Even now, even with all we've witnessed today, I've hardly begun to initiate you into reality's mysteries."

"Mm?" Prowl rolled onto his back, dim optics squinting up at Mesothulas.

"I fear I'm on the verge of toppling over a dangerous precipice," he whispered, with all the melodrama he could muster through his sleep deprivation. "I am being seduced by the wonders of the night. Remind me, dearest, before I forget, of how much more resplendent sunlight is."

"Mmh." Prowl curled one arm behind Mesothulas's head, slid off his mask with the other, and tugged him down into a sleepy kiss.

Every wire in Mesothulas’s body glowed white hot.

###

When Mesothulas woke up, he was alone on the recharge slab. The space under his outstretched arm was cold.

Prowl never got up first unless they had work. Had an alarm gone off that Mesothulas had slept through? He slunk out of bed, over to the railing, and leaned over it. Prowl was at one of Mesothulas's work tables, using his favorite computer, chin propped in his hand, his fingers covering his mouth.

"Prowl? What's up?"

Prowl looked up. His mouth was thin and straight with worry. "You need to read this."

Mesothulas's fuel tank churned, like a mass of tiny legs turned inside out and twisting inside it.

As Mesothulas climbed down the ladder, Prowl said, "Thundercracker and Skywarp didn't back up our testimony. They say they've got no idea how Starscream ended up dead, they found him that way, and they definitely didn't see his ghost. And they said _we_ found his body first."

"What?! _Why?_"

"I have no idea. Ironfist at IMD commed to warn me." Prowl stood from the computer. "It gets worse."

Mesothulas sat down and saw the headline on the article Prowl was reading. His mandibles splayed open in shock. "'Paranormal Debunkers _Invent_ Ghost Story'?!"

"Somebody at IMD leaked our interviews." Prowl started pacing behind Mesothulas. Mesothulas could hear his processor fans as he approached and receded, spinning at full blast.

The article claimed, in no uncertain terms, that Prowl and Mesothulas had made up a wild story about a living ghost. Possibly to stir up controversy and business, interviewees speculated; or possibly because they'd gone off the deep end. Mesothulas hissed several severe invectives at the screen—but with the other two main witnesses categorically rejecting the story, of course no one would believe it. Who would? Even the hardcore believers in the supernatural wouldn't buy it, especially considering that the most hardcore of them took Mesothulas and Prowl’s debunking work as a personal insult...

Mesothulas perked up. "What about Starscream's corpse? He'll _have_ to return to it soon, if he hasn't already. He might be laying in his drawer at the medical examiner's lab right now, playing dead and trying to think of some way out of his situation besides revealing himself, but sooner or later—" He turned to Prowl. Prowl's thin mouth had twisted down into a frown. "... What?"

"Starscream's gone," Prowl said. Mesothulas's optics widened. "The media doesn't know yet, but Ironfist told me that too. And no, he _didn't_ get up and walk away by himself—that would be _good_ news. Somebody broke into the lab and stole his body." Prowl commed Mesothulas a still shot from the security footage: a large purple mech with an empurata face and a gun for an arm.

Mesothulas felt a chill settle over him.

It took him a long time to register the look Prowl was giving him: even, steady, waiting. Weakly, he said, "I... I d... I thought he'd find it—intellectually stimulating. I'm s..."

Wordlessly, Prowl reached out. Mesothulas took his hand.

Prowl leaned back against the table and stared at the floor. Mesothulas turned back to the article and scrolled down to the comments, looking for the names of anyone they knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the TFBigBang event this fic was written for, authors were paired off with artists who'd do illustrations for the fic. Now that the scene it's a spoiler for has passed, [I can link the illustration that was done for the fic!](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187227059787/emporianne-my-second-piece-for-tfbigbang)
> 
> There were supposed to be two pieces of art per fic but uh, my second artist vanished somewhere.


	6. Case 4: Ratbat and the Psychic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one _might_ just be my favorite case.
> 
> (It _might_ be because it has Soundwave.)

Prowl gaped up at Mesothulas—no, not Mesothulas—

"Tarantulas?" Prowl repeated. "Did I get that right?"

He nodded. "Precisely." Every one of the fibers-threads-wires on his chest and shoulders and thighs and spindles moved independently of each other. Prowl's mind, which was programmed to track and calculate trajectories whether he told it to or not—one of the downsides to one of the upsides of having the Tactical Augmentation Routine OS—latched onto the individual motion of each fiber. In Prowl's HUD, Tarantulas's hips and upper torso were alive with numbers and calculations as his mind measured their motions.

"Okay,” Prowl said. “Tarantulas. Ta-_ran_-tu-las. Sorry, I'm not good with names; I’m trying to memorize..." As he spoke, he slowly slid downward. "I—think I need to sit for a minute."

Tarantulas nodded. "Yes, by all means. I'm sure it must be a shock."

The moment Prowl was seated, he shot straight back up and started pacing. "_How?_" He gestured at Tarantulas. "This is—this is not what you look like. I mean—your entire body shape is different like this. How do you... _turn into_ this? And what's the pattern? The time pattern? What's the significance of it?"

Tarantulas grabbed for the easiest question. "Oh, it's with the full moon."

Prowl looked up at the hole in the ceiling. Then he looked back at Tarantulas and pointed at the crescent Luna Two.

"Not _that_ moon." Tarantulas laughed. "So, picture this: here I am, with my perfect body. My ideal form. My _true_ self. There's only one problem with it: all the currently available energon blends aren't strong enough to sustain this body."

"Really?" Prowl had no idea what this had to do with the full moon, but he was willing to follow Tarantulas wherever this explanation went. "That seems—not even fuel formulated to support shuttles?"

"Formulated to support shuttles, assuming you have a shuttle-sized fuel tank. And the cost and effort a motorcycle would have to go through to acquire it—much less a beastformer! If only there were a more potent form of energon—not just a blend of the normal stuff, but an entirely new ore..." He shrugged. "But, such a thing is currently unobtainable."

Prowl nodded in what he hoped was a sympathetic way. "... But the, uh, the moon...?"

"Yes! Did you know that the moons are actually alive, in the same way Cybertron is? That is, they have engines just like Vector Sigma in their cores."

Prowl couldn't say he'd known that before, so he shook his head, but it wasn't a terribly surprising new factoid. It seemed reasonable.

"The moons' engines are partially powered by solar energy, but most of what they need, they get directly shot up to them from Cybertron's core. Vast quantities of energon, transmuted into pure energy and beamed directly to the moons. It's an invisible transfer, almost undetectable—it took millions of years to prove it was happening at all. The energy transfer happens once a lunar month, for whatever qualifies as a 'month' for that moon, when Vector Sigma calculates that the sun and moon should be opposite each other across Cybertron. That is, the full moon. And Cybertron still tries to make its energy transfer to Luna One each month, right on schedule, exactly when the missing moon _should_ be full."

Tarantulas leaned closer, looming over Prowl, like he was sharing a deep secret and was terrified of someone else hearing. "I am the only person who's ever figured out how to tap into and harness that massive energy transfer." His golden visor sparkled, curved into what had to be a gleeful smile. "I can't transfer it back into energon to save it, but for one night a Luna One month, I've got enough energy to be _myself._"

He shrank back slightly, some of the glee in his visor dimming. "The rest of the month, however, all the parts that make me _me_ are stored in sealed subspace pockets, kept in stasis, waiting."

"Wait. Hold on, wait." Prowl stood still a moment, staring at the ground between their feet, processor fans whirring as he tried to take in the sheer implications of everything Tarantulas had just told him. "So, you've got _four_ modes, you _built_ two of them yourself—based on your own designs?" He looked to Tarantulas for confirmation. Tarantulas nodded. "And you store two of them at all times in _subspace_, which means every single affected circuit, strut, and fuel line in your body is complete with or without the other two modes, which means you've got—probably _thousands_ of tiny subspace pockets all throughout your body to move all that around, and you power it with _moon energy_ you stole from _Vector Sigma_—have I missed any pertinent details?"

"Mass shifting?"

"Mass sh—! You can _mass shift?_" So Prowl's optics hadn't been tricking him when he couldn't consistently measure Tarantulas's size. "How much?"

"There aren't hard limits—it can vary depending on the time of night and how I'm feeling—but generally, from about twice this size to... the width of a shanix?"

Prowl's jaw dropped. He tried to pantomime _all of Tarantulas_ shrinking down into a coin, but didn't quite think he'd managed to convey more than frantically waving arms. "The diameter of a shanix?!"

"No, no, width as in the thickness. The side of a shanix."

"Th—! Th—?!” Prowl put a hand on his head. How did that _work_? It had to be subspace, but _how_? To shrink down smaller than the thickness of some of the _wires_ that served a regular body, Prowl couldn't _imagine_... “That's _amazing!_ That is absolutely...!"

Softly, Tarantulas said, "You know... I had hoped that you, of _all_ people, might feel that way."

Prowl realized just how effusively he'd been gushing. He froze, embarrassed. "Ah—well," he mumbled. "I mean—obviously."

Tarantulas shifted, not shrinking but crouching down so they were optic to optic. Just as softly, he said, "So you understand, then, why I can't be caught? If anyone _else_ got their hands on me—the things they would do to me..."

A knot formed in Prowl's vocalizer. He looked away. "I... can't not catch you. You've broken—a _hell_ of a lot of laws. Trespassing, theft, assault—"

"Self defense!" Tarantulas snapped, all softness gone. "Do you know how many people take potshots at big shapes with more than two legs? Even in Iacon!"

Prowl shrugged. "Trespassing and theft," he said.

"Prowl—" Tarantulas sighed harshly, straightening up and stepping back. "Yes, I've committed crimes. _So_ sorry." (Prowl got the distinct impression that he wasn't.) "But if you haul me in—look at me. Look at what I am. _You_ appreciate it, I can see that much; but will what _they_ do to me be proportional to what I've done?"

The knot got tighter. Prowl could still hear Sentinel's words, when they'd discussed the Spindleback case months earlier: _Whatever’s out there is undoubtedly some freak that needs to be eliminated_. If Prowl hauled the Spindleback up to him—whether he was Tarantulas or Mesothulas, whether Prowl tried to explain his brilliance, whether Prowl tried to defend his _basic rights as a sentient Cybertronian_—would Sentinel see him as _anything_ but a freak? Would he _treat_ him as anything but a freak?

How had he ended up in a position where justice and the law were diametrically opposed? (He tried not to wonder—as he so often had to try not to wonder, these days—if he'd ever truly been in a position where they _weren't_.)

Then, set aside them both—as unthinkable as it sounded—both justice _and_ the law. The point of both, ultimately, was to _protect_.

So how best could Prowl protect?

"You've got to stop this, Tarantulas." Prowl didn't look at him as he spoke. "This once—this _once_—I'll go. But I can't do it twice. I won't sit back and watch while you burglarize half of Iacon."

He turned to leave the same way he came.

Tarantulas shifted behind him. "Don't go."

"I promise I'm not going to tell."

"No, just—don't go. _Stay_."

Prowl froze. His spark whirled faster.

He remembered driving from Iacon to Kaon as fast as he could, with none of his possessions but what he happened to have in his pockets at the time, the same screamed words ringing in his head over and over.

"Prowl?"

He turned. Tarantulas's golden visor, for a moment, looked far too familiar and terribly unwelcome.

But beneath it were the tiny, prickling needles that, despite being like no mouth Prowl had ever seen before, seemed so much easier to read than the ambiguous emotions indicated by lips twisted and pressed together. His face was haloed by living, moving numbers. Like no one Prowl had ever seen before.

This was different.

Prowl jerked his head toward the tunnel. "They know I was in hot pursuit. I updated my location whenever I had a signal. If I don't go back and tell them I lost you, they'll come looking for me."

Tarantulas's spindles drooped sadly.

"But I'll come back tomorrow."

#####

Case 4: Ratbat and the Psychic

###

"I can't b— Mesothulas!" Prowl called from the mezzanine.

Mesothulas looked up from the finger he'd been meticulously assembling. "You're _still up?_" It was the middle of the night. Prowl shouldn't have been up. But then, it had been several weeks since their last case; there wasn't much pressure on either of them to keep to a regular schedule. And neither of them had been getting much rest.

"Yes. Mesothulas. Listen to this one."

"Prowl, please stop reading editorials."

"No, listen, this is the most— 'Much has been made of the _apparent coincidence_ of the theft of Starscream's body; but very little attention has been paid to the _convenience_ of it vis a vis the two prime suspects in the case, who have _much to gain_ if a full autopsy can't be performed to disprove their fantastical claims—‘”

"Prowl! _Please_ stop reading editorials!"

"They're saying I wanted to prevent a full autopsy, Mesothulas!" Prowl appeared at the railing, waving the datapad down at him. "They're saying that _I_ am _anti-full-autopsy!_"

Mesothulas sighed wearily. "You _did_ ask them to delay the autopsy for a few days..."

"Of course I did! Because Starscream is still alive! I can't in good conscience request an autopsy on a _living person_, even if his body _is_ dead! We should have told them what we know about the culprit—"

"And have them laugh us out of the precinct for claiming that the purple empurata victim they're looking for shares a name with a _senator_? And that we happen to know him because he tells us about _magic elixirs?_"

Prowl groaned. Not only was Mesothulas right, he was restating the reasons Prowl himself had given for not presenting what very little they knew about the culprit. Even if they tried to argue that they _knew_ he wasn't _the_ Shockwave, that the one they were looking for was probably using it as a cover name specifically _because_ it would confuse him with the senator, simply making the claim would probably not only result in their claims being completely dismissed, but also solidify Prowl and Mesothulas's reputations as attention-mongering conspiracy theorists. And at any rate, claiming they knew the corpse thief wouldn't do much to assuage suspicions that they'd been involved in the theft.

"Prowl, I am begging you to let it go. Look, count the pluses, here." He used the half-finished finger to count off points on his opposite hand. "They didn't find adequate evidence to accuse us of anything—"

"—They think I used my IMD connections to cover up the evidence—"

"—_and_ they found the other residents' missing property in Starscream's apartment, so they know he really was a thief. _And_ they positively identified Bumblebee, and the residents agree he's the bot Starscream tried to frame as a ghost. Three pluses. Isn't it enough that everyone knows we weren't insane to say Starscream's behind the hauntings?"

"Yeah. Great. We're just insane to say he's a _ghost_." He leaned on the railing with arms crossed, fuming.

Mesothulas set his work down, slid off his work table, and headed to the closest ladder. "Prowl, we always _knew_ that everyone was going to think we were crazy if we ever found something real—"

"Well! Well, I _didn't_ expect to find something real! Or, if we _did_, I expected that _before_ the whole planet found out about it, we were going to have evidence so incontrovertible that any rational mech would have no choice but to believe! Having our evidence be stolen by the one-eyed, one-gunned flying purple carcass eater wasn't on my list of expectations!"

Prowl didn't look at him—didn't fling any accusations at him—but Mesothulas felt it pierce his spark anyway. He stopped at the top of the ladder. "You prepared that line, didn't you? The 'one-eyed, one-gunned'..."

"No." Prowl paused. "Kind of. I've been thinking and trying not to say it. I'm sorry. It was..." He sighed. "It's not _your_ fault that _somebody else_ decided to steal a corpse just because you told him about it.”

"That's gracious of you." Mesothulas turned around and sat on the mezzanine floor, heels kicking at the ladder. Prowl scooted over and sat next to him, forehead on the railing. "I _do_ wish you would stop checking the news and re-upsetting yourself, though."

"Ratchet wants to make sure he doesn't end up in any articles about us," Prowl said dully. "If some reporter digs up the connection and tries to make a scandal out of it, I want to find out _before_ he comms me."

"So get an alert for his name. You don't have to read every unkind thing anyone with a news blog says about us."

Prowl didn't answer. But from the corner of his optics, Mesothulas could see him look back at the datapad and start typing on it.

"You are right, though. This is... far from ideal," Mesothulas went on. "I'm used to being considered crazy, _that's_ no big deal. But the impact on our business..."

Their business inquiries had dried up. Mesothulas had tried to fill his sudden free time with more work on his next masterpiece; but although the mess in his workspace was beginning to look less like a pile of parts and more like a dismembered person, he found his enthusiasm waning now that it was a full-time job rather than a hobby he had to make time for.

Prowl had finished his paper on Mirage’s apartment, and after pacing the length of the apartment several times to bolster his nerves, had forced himself to submit it to several of their usual journals for consideration. He hadn’t heard back from any of them yet. Aside from that, he’d been filling his time with reading and, from what Mesothulas could tell, brooding. A couple of days ago, he'd spoken in a hollow voice of the possible imminent necessity of _networking_, as though it were a painful medical treatment that worked by subjecting the body to such torture that the targeted disease could no longer survive in such a hostile environment.

And so, it was little surprise to Mesothulas when Prowl shifted and said, unhappily, "There's that... fancy party that _Senator_ Shockwave invited us to by way of Sentinel." (Mesothulas didn't comment when Prowl stressed the word _Senator_.)

Mesothulas groaned. It was just a couple of nights away, and he’d begun to pick up on Prowl’s dread of the coming event. "I wonder if it would be acceptable to turn down the invitation on the grounds that half of Iacon thinks we killed a mech and we don't want to show our faces."

"In Senate circles? It would be a major faux pas. A few millennia ago, Dai Atlas challenged Proteus to a duel over a tax cut. Proteus avoided him for months, but they both showed up to a dinner for one of the new Arks because it would have been unacceptable not to after the Prime issued the invitations."

Mesothulas made a strangled sound. "Did they duel?"

"Dai Atlas chased him out of the hall with a sword, I think. I've heard several versions of the story."

Mesothulas made another strangled noise. "It's a wonder that it doesn't happen more often, I suppose. How is it that Ulchtar is the only senator to get a grenade lobbed at him for embezzling?"

"Didn't embezzle enough to hire bodyguards?"

Mesothulas snorted. "All right. I suppose we _should_ go. _Networking_ and all. But, I'll only do it on one condition."

"That is?"

"I want us to call in the favor that Mirage owes us."

###

"A Senate party! I'm jealous." Mirage was all smiles as he ushered them in. "It's been ages since I've been to one. How _did_ you score an invitation?"

"Through you, I think," Prowl said.

Mirage's smile widened. "How's that?"

"Sentinel Prime tells us that Senator Shockwave wants to meet us because of services rendered to one of his students," Mesothulas said. "We assumed that's you? We noted your diploma from Jhiaxian the last time we were here."

"Ah! Yes yes yes. Shockwave was asking how I made Cyclonus's acquaintance. He's old nobility, it turns out. They knew each other through Jhiaxus himself. Small world, isn't it?" He opened the door to the wash rack. "Use whatever you'd like. If you need help working the controls, I'll be out here."

"Thank you." Prowl headed straight to the closet of cleaning materials.

Mesothulas paused just through the doorway. "Oh, if I may ask... At Jhiaxian, were you in the day or night classes?"

Mirage tipped his chin up in surprise, and then gave Mesothulas a knowing smile. "Oh, I attended ages ago. Before the original school burned down," he said. "All students were in day classes back then."

Mesothulas nodded uncertainly. "Huh."

"Do enjoy yourselves!" The door slid shut.

Mesothulas glanced at Prowl's back—stretched straight, doors spread out, balancing on the tips of his feet as he reached for a towel on a high shelf—and murmured to himself, "I think we shall."

###

They did.

###

They argued almost to the door about whether or not it would be inappropriate and/or suspicious for Mesothulas to show up wearing a silk cape. ("It's not like I stole it! I wove it myself!" "I know, that's the suspicious part.") Just before going in, they reached a compromise, and Mesothulas slung the cape around his shoulders like a scarf.

In the lobby, they had to ask the door mech for directions to the party, prompting him to ask if they were actually invited if they didn’t already know. But Mesothulas’s impressive scarf persuaded him of their credentials, and he directed them to the lift.

The party was held high in a towering building where one of the senators either—they didn’t quite overhear the whole sentence—owned a penthouse or owned the building itself. The event space itself was an impressive and well-furnished series of clubrooms with a spectacular view of downtown Iacon. Prowl had never been to a Senate party that _didn’t_ have a spectacular view. He suspected they had some rule about having a party below twenty-five stories in the air. For the life of them, Prowl and Mesothulas couldn’t see any indication of the occasion behind the party.

The clubroom setting was a bit more intimate than they'd been expecting—it gave off the feeling of the sort of opulent but obscure private venues where the senators _really_ decided most of Cybertron's political affairs, and therefore not the kind of place where mechs the likes of them should have been invited. Nevertheless, they treated this cozy get-together the same way they would treat any other party:

As soon as they made it past the crowd around the entrance, they found the nearest unoccupied space on the perimeter and wallflowered.

A mech whose paint was so reflective they could see their faces in his chest stopped in front of them. "That's such a fine fabric," he said, bending over Mesothulas. His own cape, deep purple, swung heavily around him. "Wherever _did_ you get it?"

"Oh! I—made it myself, in fact!" At Prowl's look, Mesothulas quickly added, "I-in a lab."

The shiny mech straightened up. "Oh. Not imported?"

"Er—no, I—"

The shiny mech had already turned away with a disinterested murmur and moved on.

"Networking," Mesothulas muttered. "Who _was_ that, do you recognize him?"

"I can't remember his name, some senator from up north. He's a big deal."

"Hm."

Prowl's gaze swept the room like a security camera. His back went stiff. "Sentinel's coming over."

"What? Where?" Mesothulas leaned around Prowl.

"No, get behind me, don't get Sentinel's attention." He stepped slightly in front of Mesothulas. "Please don't say anything weird."

"So no asking him where he falls on the 'can changing your optic color change your destiny' debate?"

Prowl shot him a dark look.

"Prowl! I didn't think you were coming, considering your recent scandal."

Prowl started, turning to face Sentinel. "Sir! I thought it would be more indecorous to turn down an invitation from a senator."

"Hm. Well, if it were any other senator, perhaps." Sentinel barely looked at Prowl as he spoke, optics wandering vaguely around the crowd. It was, Prowl supposed, better than the piercingly direct attention Sentinel usually gave his conversation partners. "Anyway, I don't intend to speak with you long—I've got to go around to the senators, drum up some support—but I did want to come over and say this personally: I'm very disappointed in you, Prowl."

The words stung, but even to Prowl, they sounded halfhearted. He considered that encouraging. "Yes sir, I know sir."

"You had so much potential, Prowl." He still sounded like he was reading off a cue card, and not very enthusiastically at that. "I once had such high expectations for you."

"Yes sir, thank you sir."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"Sorry, sir."

"Murder accusations aside—I have no opinion on that; I'm sure the ex-Seeker would have deserved it if you _had_ done it—" (Prowl suppressed a scowl), "but with the shameful way you're wading about in superstition and fantasy, why, I feel like I hardly know you anymore—"

Mesothulas had had enough of being ignored and listening to Prowl be abused (even if it _was_ the most unenthusiastic abuse he'd ever heard), so he casually cut off the supreme ruler of the planet with a "Pardon, excuse me, you said something interesting a moment ago—you said you were drumming up support? For what?"

Sentinel fell silent and stared at Mesothulas. His optics flickered oddly, like he was trying to remember what Mesothulas was talking about. "Oh, of course! Yes. The expansion."

Mesothulas nodded, feigning interest.

"Yes, it's high time that Cybertron returns to pursuing its destiny: establishing and maintaining dominion over the galaxy. There are still colonies, somewhere out there, with whom Cybertron has lost contact. We need to reconnect with them and, from those strongholds, expand outward."

"Very ambitious," Mesothulas said politely. Prowl had lost his battle to keep a neutral expression and was frowning more with each sentence. Sentinel sounded more enthusiastic now; but still, somehow, like he was reading off a cue card—and not one he'd written. Prowl would know. He'd heard Sentinel read off cue cards thousands of times. Usually, he was the one who'd written them.

"All Cybertron holds now is a smattering of scattered mining outposts. It's shameful. We became too complacent during the Golden Age. It's time again for an age of steel—of conquest." Sentinel cast a disgusted look around the party. "However, the Senate doesn't want to provide funding, because they suck and are wimps."

Prowl disguised a laugh as a cough. _That_ sounded like Sentinel.

Mesothulas nodded. "Oh, uh-huh. Establishing dominion over the galaxy, I see." He paused. "Because establishing dominion over Kaon has been going so well, hm?"

In less than a second, Prowl passed through all five stages of grief and made peace with his imminent execution.

To his surprise, though, Sentinel's optics flickered again in puzzlement, and he gave Mesothulas a look like he was actually thinking it over. As though he had to put deep consideration into whether it was a good idea to conquer the galaxy when Kaon was still a bit of a mess.

Then he gave Prowl one last dark look, said, "Try _not_ to spout your ghost conspiracy theories quite so loudly next time," and moved on.

Prowl waited until he was out of audial shot, and then elbowed Mesothulas hard, hissing, "I told you not to antagonize him."

"Hyeh—technically, you didn't."

Prowl grumbled. He didn't think he _should_ have had to.

"Hey, Prowl," Mesothulas said, "are you sad about all your wasted potential? All that glorious potential you squandered? Think: right now, you could be working for the Prime himself, making plans to take over the universe. It must be such a letdown that you're here instead, on the arm of the smartest and best-dressed Cybertronian alive." Mesothulas shook his head, tisking.

"Shut up," Prowl said, with no rancor. "But—yeah, Sentinel really _did_ find a way to get worse, didn't he?" It was kind of impressive, in a horrific way. "He's never had any interest in conquering the galaxy before."

"Really? I kind of assumed it was the default thing Primes were into. Maybe not Nominus so much, but even he'd talk about it from time to time."

"Not Sentinel. He even told me that he thought a Prime's responsibility was to the Cybertronian home world alone, and that expansion was the business of people who didn't properly appreciate our home. He said that if we reconnected with any colonies in his lifetime, he wasn't considering them his responsibility unless they moved back to Cybertronian soil." Which was a _whole different_ mess of issues—but issues that seemed like quite the polar opposite of reclaiming the colonies and whatever planets they could reach beyond that.

"Hm. Someone must have talked him around."

"I suppose." Although Prowl had no idea who in Sentinel's inner circle would want that. Did he have a new inner circle, now? Was there anyone left around him to check their bad advice? The thought made Prowl's fuel tank churn with guilt.

There had been a point when Prowl had been in the Security Services where he'd had no choice but to admit to himself that he was in a system that wasn't merely flawed, but fundamentally structurally corrupt. And from there, he had only had two options: to stay, and commit himself wholly and completely for the rest of his life to doing everything he could to change the system from within, regardless of the professional and personal costs he'd face, whether they be demotions or threats or arrests or violence; or to refuse to be further complicit in the system in any way, extract himself completely, and never go back.

He'd chosen the second option. The second option was a _good_ option, but Prowl feared it was the _lesser_ good. And in his spark, he knew that he'd only chosen it because it was the easier option—and because it was the option that let him choose Mesothulas.

Looking at Sentinel striding off to go talk some senator into funding galactic conquest, Prowl wondered if he might have steered him away from that if he'd stayed.

"Anyway," Mesothulas said, "I've got a subspace pocket designed specifically for smuggling snacks and work's been slow lately; do you want to help me steal hors d'oeuvres so we won't starve?"

Prowl gave him a long, hard look. Then he sighed. "What the hell, why not."

###

"Prowl! Good to see you again!"

Prowl started, dropping two little fluffy cream things on doilies back to the snack table. He turned around, facing the mech calling to him from halfway across the room. "Senator Shockwave, sir. A—pleasure to see you."

"Wait," Mesothulas hissed, "you actually _know_ Senator Shockwave?"

"Mh." Prowl dropped his voice, watching as Shockwave got closer. "He and Orion had some crazy conspiracy theory about Nominus's death and the assault on Senator Sherma. It didn't pan out. Tumbler got sucked in. It was the worst."

Mesothulas wheezed breathlessly. "You didn't mention Orion had a _senator_ in on it."

If Shockwave hadn't greeted them first, Prowl wouldn't have recognized him. He was mostly orange this time, with white and blue accents. He rushed up to them with a beaming grin and both hands stretched wide, and Prowl sincerely hoped that he meant that as just a welcoming gesture and not as an overture to a hug.

"It's been forever! Ah, and you must be Mesothulas." To Prowl's relief, Shockwave lowered one hand and stretched the other out to Mesothulas to shake. "That's quite the shawl you have. Wherever did you get it?”

"Oh, I made it," Mesothulas said dismissively.

"_Did_ you? Marvelous, truly marvelous!" He shook Mesothulas's hand harder. Mesothulas wobbled. "I'm quite a fan of fashion myself. I've _always_ thought that Cybertron ought to start up its own textile industry—we ought to be innovators, instead of importers. That looks like such a fine fabric, can I touch it?" Mesothulas nodded dumbly. Shockwave plucked up the edge between two fingers. "Ooh, yes—I don't think I recognize the material; what do you measure this in? Thread count? Momme?"

"Er—momme."

"It must be, what, 23, 24 momme?"

"29, in fact."

"Twenty-_nine_! Extraordinary. Would you be willing to explain how you made it?"

"I—" Mesothulas stared at Shockwave, optics wide, trying to figure out how to explain that his process was _turn into an eight-legged freak, pull the thread out of his forearms, and use his own outstretched legs as a loom to weave_. "... No?"

"... Ah." Shockwave leaned back, his smile dimming. "Very well. That's—that's fine. I'm sure you must have a patent pending."

"In process," Mesothulas lied.

Shockwave bounced back quickly from the disappointment. "Well, anyway! I was sure you would be bright—Prowl doesn't seem to be the sort to hang out with anyone who isn’t, the last mech I saw him paling around with certainly wasn't—but I'm absolutely delighted to see that you're an inventor. I'm rather a fan of science myself. Don't _do_ it, really—I used to dabble but I'm not really temperamentally suited for it, far too busy anyway—but I do like to read, keep abreast of the latest discoveries. I've read every paper you two have put out so far. Fascinating stuff—such a broad array of disciplines you touch on."

"I didn't think you’d be interested, sir," Prowl said, and caught Mesothulas’s wince from the corner of his optic. "I don't mean that as a—that you're not— It's flattering, I mean."

"I believe Prowl is attempting to convey our gratitude for your attention," Mesothulas said. "Believe it or not, he does most of the writing."

"I believe it," Shockwave said. "It's very—matter-of-fact. I appreciate that. It makes the wilder ideas more digestible."

"Yes, that's what I think," Prowl said, nodding.

"Anyway—I'm delighted you two are here. I might have some business for you, in fact." He stepped closer and turned slightly, nodding across the room toward a discreet doorway. "I believe Senator Ratbat just stepped out that way," he said quietly, "but he's got a bit of an oddity he'd like you to look into. Strictly hush-hush, of course. He’ll give you the details."

"Ah. Right." Prowl eyed the door Ratbat had supposedly stepped out of. "So, uh—should we wait here for him to come back, or—?"

"I'm sure we can catch up to him. Thank you _so_ much, senator." Mesothulas squeezed a hand around Prowl's upper arm and tugged him off.

"Uh—" Prowl turned around. "Bye, Shockwave. Senator sir." He twisted back around to face Mesothulas. "We can't just follow a _senator_," he whispered. "That's—well, not quite _stalking_—but _intrusive_ at the very least—"

"He stepped out of the room to meet with _us_, dear."

"Oh. Ohhh." Well, that made perfect sense, didn't it. "Too bad it has to be _Ratbat_. I don't like him."

"Do you know _everybody_ at this party?"

"No, not _everyone._ I—" He raised his voice and turned as they passed someone. "Oh! Hey, Jazz! Working security?"

Jazz gave Prowl a surprised smile as he passed, raising a small drink he clearly hadn't touched since he received it. "Hey. Here to lend poor Security Services a hand?"

"No, just to sip cocktails and gloat over you."

Jazz laughed, and turned back to surveying the crowd.

Mesothulas shook his head. "You _do_ know everybody here."

Prowl was silent a moment. "Well. I can't really argue _now_."

Ratbat was lingering pointedly just a bit down a hallway with warm lights and bronze walls that felt vaguely like they’d come out of a period piece about early Golden Age space exploration. He smiled widely as the two of them approached. "Ah, the famous ghost hunters. _Delighted_." He didn't say _delighted_ with half the sincerity that Shockwave had. "I'll have to thank Shockwave later for introducing us—but, let's get right down to business, shall we?" He waved a hand at a door to open it and glanced at Prowl. "I seem to recall you prefer to eschew pleasantries."

Prowl nodded. "That's right."

The small room he ushered them into looked like it might be used to play cards, but was more likely one of those suspected opulent spaces where policy was decided. Ratbat pressed a button on the card table to fold it into the floor and took one of the comfier chairs that folded out in its place. He gestured to two more for Prowl and Mesothulas. They ended up sitting just a bit too close to Ratbat for comfort, and couldn't help but notice that he'd put himself between them and the exit. "Well, I know you two do _ghosts_—made _quite_ a stir, that—but what else do you do?"

Mesothulas piped up, "Prowl does cryptids. Well—one, at least."

Prowl nearly kicked him. "A wide variety of paranormal phenomena," he said quickly, "not just ghosts."

"Mhm. What about ESP? Psychics, possession...?"

Mesothulas nodded slowly. "Yyyes, we've investigated a few self-professed psychics in our time."

"All debunked, I assume?" Ratbat asked.

"With rigorous testing and documentation," Prowl said.

"Excellent! Then I've got quite a case for you. A chance for you to redeem yourselves, perhaps?"

Mesothulas spread his hands. "We're all audials, sir."

Ratbat leaned in close, draping his arms around their shoulders. Prowl fought to keep his shoulders from rising up in discomfort. Mesothulas didn't do much better. "There's a little psychic shop in Kaon run by a bot who _claims_ to be clairvoyant," Ratbat said. "If it's true, then I absolutely _must_ have him and his pets assist in my business endeavors. I've checked him out myself, of course, and find him _very_ convincing—but it could easily be parlor tricks I don't have the experience to recognize, couldn't it? Con artists are good at that. And you two must be the experts on con artistry.”

Prowl and Mesothulas exchanged a glance, but weren't sure whether that was a jab at their business or a comment on their clientele, so they said nothing.

"Your pay is the same whether the psychic is legitimate or not, correct?"

"Yes, of course," Prowl said. "Our job is to investigate and determine the truth. Our fees are independent of the results of the investigation."

"Good. Then I'm happy to hand over half up front." He slid his arm off of Prowl to pull out and offer over a currency card with its current contents displayed in thin digital numbers. It was an absolutely absurd quantity of money. "Take however long you need to determine whether he's the real deal."

They stared at the card. Prowl very gingerly took it. Mesothulas offered Ratbat his hand. "We'll be in touch as soon as we've reached a determination, senator."

###

"Hold on," Prowl said. "I want to talk to Jazz properly before we leave."

"I can't believe you know every single person, individually, at this massive party full of senators." Mesothulas shook his head in faux amazement.

"Come on."

"I'll wait by the door." They split off, and Prowl headed to where he saw Jazz unobtrusively circling the perimeter of the crowd.

"Hey." Jazz grinned. "Came back by to gloat?"

"To say hi properly before leaving. I was in a hurry earlier."

Jazz nodded. "Listen—I've been meaning to apologize for referring that job to you. I thought something about Starscream seemed shady, but if I'd had any idea..."

"You couldn't have. You're forgiven." Prowl sighed. "I suppose, at the least, it's the most interesting job we've ever taken. It's probably the closest we're ever going to get to something that can reasonably be labeled a ghost. _That's_ something."

Jazz didn't reply.

Prowl looked at him. He was still smiling, but it somehow looked different now. "Oh. You don't believe our— Sorry. I’d—automatically expected that you would consider my testimony credible. I apologize for the assumption."

"I, uh..." Jazz looked away, scanning over the crowd. "Kinda thought most of the statements attributed to you got misreported."

"Ah." Prowl looked down.

Even Jazz. Prowl considered Jazz a _friend,_ not just a cordial colleague. He'd thought if _anyone_ would give him the benefit of the doubt—would _know him_ well enough to recognize he was too rational to fall for a wild story without incontrovertible evidence... "I'm distracting you from your duties."

"Hey—I'm sure this'll all blow over soon. Yeah?"

"Ideally." Prowl trudged across the room to Mesothulas.

Mesothulas pushed off the wall near the door. "That was shorter than I expected."

"Jazz doesn't believe me." Prowl grimaced. "I was stupid to expect him to, I suppose."

"Oh."

They were silent all the way down the lift and until they'd left the building, and were alone on the streetlamp-lit sidewalk.

"For what it's worth," Mesothulas said, "_I_ believe you."

"Of course you do. You were there."

"Still better than nothing, isn't it?" They walked along one of the paths leading away from the building until they reached a street where alt-modes were permitted, and then transformed and headed toward home.

"It's weird," Mesothulas said. "I feel vaguely like I've met Senator Shockwave before. Where would I have met him?"

"You didn't attend Jhiaxian Academy, did you?"

"No. 'Advanced Technology' moniker aside, it's really too generalized a school for any of my needs."

"Well—he's charismatic. All charismatic people are the same people. I'm convinced of it," Prowl said. Mesothulas snorted. "Really! You can't tell them apart. If someone is charismatic, then they have only one additional personality trait. It's morality, and it's a sliding scale with the two extremes set at _self-righteous_ and _greasy._ Seriously, think of the three most charismatic people you know."

Mesothulas considered that a moment. "I think you're right, they're all the same people. Charisma _is_ a personality." He paused. "Furthermore, I hate all three of those people—and I don't think I like Senator Shockwave either."

"Neither do I."

###

Defying both of their natural inclinations, they got up before the dawn started chasing away the stars in order to avoid the morning traffic leaving Iacon.

Instead, they hit the morning traffic entering Kaon.

"We should have left at lunch time to avoid the traffic,” Prowl said. Traffic was so slow and so thick that Mesothulas had transformed to sit on top of Prowl so they wouldn't get separated.

"Can you turn your siren on?"

"That's illegal."

"We _should_ just move to Kaon. We've been doing so many jobs here lately," Mesothulas said. "And the rent's cheaper."

"There's a good reason for that."

Mesothulas laughed and drummed his fingers on Prowl's roof to burn off some pent-up energy.

Once they were within city limits (and Mesothulas was back on the road), finding the address Ratbat had given them was a work of navigating through narrow, winding back alleys, compounded by several wrong turns because Prowl had the GPS coordinates but no map telling him which streets would lead to them and Mesothulas had downloaded a map but kept losing track of where they were on it.

But finally, in the back alley of a back alley, they found a ramshackle little shop. In the shade of the buildings towering around it on every side, it glared pink and red. It was absolutely plastered in neon signs: an optic with a spark in it, thirteen rainbow-colored stars, pentagram-shaped Matrix/t-cog/brain/spark/flame motifs, and a bunch of symbols that were clearly supposed to look mysterious and exotic but were probably just random words in alien languages—the usual fortune teller rubbish. Stretched out above it all was a pink cursive neon sign that said, **_“He can hear your future...”_** complete with ellipsis and unnecessary quote marks.

They looked at the storefront, and then each other. Oh yeah. There wasn't a chance this wasn't a fake.

There was less neon inside the dim, narrow shop, although the thirteen rainbow stars repeated around the high wall. A stained glass wind chime tinkled as the ceiling fan it hung from slowly turned. The tables lining the room were crowded with magnetic good luck charms, crystals, clear bags of colorful silica... But there was no one behind the front register. The only living beings in the room were two birds on a perch in the back and a black cat lounging under a table near the door.

Prowl eyed the cat uncertainly. In Security Services, he'd gotten in the habit of automatically assuming any animal he crossed paths with was a beastformer. Better to accidentally talk to a wild animal than to accidentally slight a person. So he said tentatively, "Excuse me. We're looking for a Soundwave. Is he here? Is... that you?"

The cat looked up at Prowl, flicked its tail, and meowed.

"Oh."

Mesothulas crouched so he could see under the table better. "Oh, don't give us that. I can see your transformation seams."

The cat froze. "... Yeah, Soundwave's in the back. I'll get him." He stood, stretched, and padded across the floor.

As Mesothulas straightened back up, Prowl leaned over to him and murmured, "That dog's familiar. I'm pretty sure he has a police file."

Mesothulas wheezed. "'Dog.'"

"Hey," one of the birds called, as the cat disappeared behind a bead curtain. "What about us? Can you see our transformation seams too? Are we people?"

Mesothulas planted his hands on his hips, surveyed them from across the room, and said, "No, you're clearly just a pair of regular birds."

They both squawked in laughter. "I like him," the other one said.

The mech who came out was an unassuming dull blue bot with no readily identifiable kibble, with hunched shoulders and a downcast face—far from the flamboyant performer that the neon storefront implied. He tipped his head up toward them—although it was impossible to tell where exactly he was looking through his visor—looked down again, and shyly mumbled, "Hi."

“Hi,” Prowl replied, and Mesothulas chirped, “Hello!”

And with that, they had this operation pegged.

Ratbat had referred to his suspected psychic as having "pets." Evidently, he didn't know that the cat and birds were people. Most likely, they were in charge here, but pretended to be animals unless they were called out on it. This Soundwave was probably their employee, an actor at best.

Most likely, the three beastformers did recon in this main room, doing a cold read on the customers and listening to whatever they said when they thought the psychic wouldn't be listening in. They fed that info to Soundwave, and from there he did what every carnival fortune teller in history had done: make vague, broad guesses, and based on the clients' reactions, gradually narrow his statements down to what they wanted to hear.

However, Prowl didn't give off reactions—especially when he chose not to—and Mesothulas was very good at deliberately sending off inaccurate signals, so they had a very high success rate with luring psychics into confidently spouting absolutely off-base rubbish. It would be easy to trick Soundwave into saying something that clearly exposed him.

"I offer guidance on the future." Soundwave's voice was unexpectedly musical, like several voices layered on top of each other. Maybe that was why he'd been chosen as the actor despite his lack of stage presence. "That is what you seek. Correct?"

Prowl nodded. "Oh, absolutely," Mesothulas said.

"Okay." Soundwave held open the bead curtain. "Come on back."

The cat came back with them, without asking and without explaining—which just supported the hypothesis that he was really in charge.

It was a very traditional room for a strip mall psychic—dark paint, lots of mirrors, neon lighting. (The mirrors were going to drive Prowl crazy—everywhere he looked, reflections within reflections, and his processor was going to try to calculate the trajectory of the motion of each reflected object like they were separate real things.) There was even a plasma ball on the table, which was about the most stereotypical piece of fortune teller paraphernalia on the market.

Mesothulas nodded at the ball. "I expect you'll be having us put our hands on the ball first?" That was the usual routine: divining customers’ futures from the movement of the plasma filaments reaching for their hands.

"Negative. The plasma ball is for me." He sat, and the cat hopped up in his lap. "It helps me concentrate." He gestured across the table, and Prowl and Mesothulas sat as well.

"I'm sure you need to know why we're here," Prowl said. "The matters that we want to discuss."

Soundwave turned on the plasma ball and ghosted his fingertips across the surface. Ten strings of plasma light twisted and coiled against his fingertips. "Affirmative. Everyone comes with a question they want to have answered," he said. "I sense that your primary question is... Subject: myself. Not an infrequent occurrence."

He leaned forward, pressing the heels of his palms to the ball. "However: there is a deeper question underneath. About... hm." He stared into the ball. "Something interpersonal. Partnership, relationship... business?" He nodded to himself. "A business. Concerns for its future."

He looked up at the two of them. "Soundwave: cannot directly answer the question you came to have answered; can describe capabilities—but without witnessing proof, you will not believe. Therefore: I will address your deeper question, instead."

They listened critically. Prowl sat up straighter; Mesothulas leaned forward.

Prowl was slightly surprised that he knew they were primarily there to observe _him_, and slightly surprised that he knew they had a business and were concerned for it at the moment. But, they _were_ known public figures. They were in and out of the news, even if not as frequently in Kaon. It was possible he or his cohorts recognized them, assumed that Soundwave himself was being investigated, and further assumed that after the recent scandal they were worried about the stability of their paranormal investigating business.

But it was also equally possible that he was doing what so many psychics did: groping around blindly until he stumbled upon something in the right ballpark and picked up cues from them. They might have tells they hadn't noticed. (_Prowl_ was certainly wearing his best inscrutable face; but a small handful of mechs could see past it. A good "psychic" was a good reader of body language.) And he hadn't said anything spectacular yet that he only could have gotten by knowing who they were. After all, _every_ new customer to a psychic came in wondering whether the psychic they were paying was the real deal. Most psychics just didn't have the struts to acknowledge it out loud, as though acknowledging doubt would solidify it.

"The business has experienced recent difficulties. You are concerned about its future success. It had been successful until a recent downward turn. There was—a betrayal?" He seemed to be asking the plasma ball. "Negative—someone told a lie. It has hurt your credibility. You are furious about it." He turned to Prowl. "_You_ are furious about it." Prowl remained expressionless. Soundwave turned to Mesothulas. "You care less about what the public thinks than him. He will not stop listening to what other people say."

Mostly accurate, but of medium specificity. There was no doubt now that he'd seen the news about them. And he'd guessed one thing wrong: neither of them could be said to care very much about what others thought of them, but of the two of them, they both would certainly agree that Prowl cared less. He put no stock in other people's opinions of him. Meanwhile, Mesothulas was the one constantly doing damage control with their clients, making sure they were both viewed favorably.

... Was that really true, though? To himself, Prowl had to concede: in this situation, he _was_ the furious one; he _was_ the one reading every article that mentioned their scandal; he _was_ the one who'd run into one person after another who felt the need to tell him what they thought about what he was doing with his life. Prowl knew that the only reason he didn't care about what other people thought about him was because he'd _chosen_ not to care. He was reminded that he’d made that choice every time he almost _did_ care, felt the sting, and deliberately quieted it. He'd trained himself to be indifferent because the alternative was to constantly fret about being constantly judged by people whose approval he lacked the inbuilt social skills to obtain. For Prowl, apathy was a survival skill; for Mesothulas, it was an instinct.

But this was ridiculous. If Soundwave had said that Mesothulas cared more, Prowl could have just as easily pulled up the mental justifications to support that, too. It was all suggestion; once an idea was planted, the brain looked for evidence to support it. Soundwave hadn't proven anything yet.

The cat pawed lightly at Soundwave's chest, and it wasn't until he did that Prowl or Mesothulas noticed that Soundwave had paused. Was he waiting for reactions from them? "Do go on," Mesothulas said.

Soundwave nodded. "You were recently given a chance to save this... this... it _is_ a business, right?" That was a stock psychic trick: saying something generic, asking the clients themselves to clarify, and then nodding like the correction lined up with what he'd assumed. Except Soundwave immediately went on without waiting for clarification: "Hobby—no. More important than that. Passion and love equal to a personal hobby, but not. It _is_ a business. With a... a sort of... sense of purpose, too. A calling." (Which was certainly true about their little paranormal investigation service; but it was also a statement that could be agreed on by anyone who'd ever started their own business—you don't take undertake the risk of fighting your way out of your function to bet your livelihood upon an unproven business if you _don't_ feel like it's calling to you.) "Okay. But still a business." With that apparently settled in Soundwave's mind, he moved on.

"Your second chance has... not played out yet. You are going to follow it, but you are concerned about whether it will lead you back toward success. It will. However, not immediately and not directly. You will not receive instant results. The results of this second chance could take a long time to manifest in the way you want to see. Your business will likely take a further dip before it improves—or, at the very least, stay stable as it is now—but it _will_ eventually improve. You'll regain your former successes." He looked at Mesothulas. "However: you are probably never going to impress his previous partner. Apologies. But his presence will continue to fade. Remember that he is the ‘previous partner’ and you are the present partner for a reason.”

Prowl was wondering where in the _world_ a comment like that had come from, when Mesothulas let out a tiny strangled sound that Prowl was absolutely sure was not on the "play it cool and don't give Soundwave anything to work off of" script. He turned to give Mesothulas a baffled look. Really? He wanted to impress _Tumbler_? Prowl couldn't even remember if they'd ever _met_. Why was that a priority?

Mesothulas did not look at Prowl. He meekly mumbled, "Duly noted." Prowl stared at him.

Okay. No. Be professional. Be _skeptical_. Most people have had a non-specified “previous partner" of some kind in some way, whether it be a coworker, a business partner, a lover, or whatever else; and most _new_ partners are going to compare themselves to their partner's last partner and be concerned about how they compare, even if only in a fleeting thought—but they would focus on that fleeting thought and amplify it after a comment like Soundwave's. He could have randomly directed the comment at either of them; it could have been as little as good luck on his part that he aimed it at Mesothulas.

And vast swathes of his offered fortune were incredibly generic. _You were recently given a second chance_—if they didn't think they had a second chance, they wouldn't still be in business. _Your business will likely take a further dip before it improves_—"there will be some ups and some downs" was as generic a prediction as they'd ever heard. _But it will eventually improve_—of course it would; a fortune teller never offered an overall negative fortune unless they planned on selling a charm to ward it off. People went to psychics expecting good news and vagueness; good psychics mixed in a little negativity to make it sound realistic, but overall promised a happy ending.

What impressed Prowl about this actor was that he didn't offer vague half-suggestions and lure Prowl and Mesothulas into filling in the details for him; he confidently placed them out there, no matter how specific or vague they were, and then steamrolled forward without even waiting for confirmation. But then if he _had_ seen articles on them, he wouldn't need to wait for clarification, would he? At least not for most details.

It wasn't conclusive, though. He had to be a master of both hot reading and cold reading to have not needed to backtrack over _any_ statements yet despite not having asked Prowl or Mesothulas to supply anything themselves; but he'd also _neither_ said anything he needed to be a clairvoyant to know _nor_ said or done anything that conclusively outed him as a fraud. His predictions were too open-ended to prove anything even if they _did_ come true. They needed to lure out a few more details, see if he slipped up.

Mesothulas had the same thought. (And, in any case, he wanted to move them well past the embarrassing accusation about Prowl's ex-partner. Stupid of him, to slip up like that over an educated guess intended to take him by surprise.) He asked, "So, then, what else can we do to try to... speed the process along? To get our business back to where it ought to be? If anything."

Soundwave gave him a tilted head look, grimacing, as though he was saying, _come on, now_. Like he thought—what? That Mesothulas was wasting his time by asking?

The cat swatted Soundwave more firmly. _Definitely_ calling the shots.

"Okay." Soundwave drummed on his plasma ball. Tiny bolts of light appeared and vanished with each tap. Prowl winced and looked away to try to avoid the tiny strobe light show, but found it repeated in the mirrors surrounding the table. Soundwave planted both hands flat on the ball. “Suggestion: avoid skeptics, doubters. The ones who tell you they think you will fail are the ones who want to see you fail. Your business: failed; their worldview: validated. You are committed to your truth. Attempts to appease them will drain your energy. Work on your customers, not your doubters."

Still not psychic, but pretty good advice, all things considered.

Soundwave looked at Prowl. "_Especially_ the one in the hospital. He will never respect what you do. In matters of faith, belief, he is too sure he has the answers to respect anyone who asks questions."

Prowl was careful not to reveal his surprise. That was an unnervingly on-point analysis of Ratchet. Prowl was _sure_ that Ratchet had never been mentioned in any articles—he’d combed every article that mentioned them to be sure. How...?

"And," Soundwave continued, "senators are big spenders, but not very good prospects for repeat business. Don't put your efforts into making them long-term clientele." The cat swatted at Soundwave again.

But Ratbat said he'd checked Soundwave out himself; maybe he'd hinted to Soundwave that he might want to bring him into his circle, or maybe when Soundwave had recognized Prowl and Mesothulas, he'd guessed that Ratbat must have hired them—

"All right." Soundwave sat back. "That is enough. Agreed?" Like he was getting impatient. Mesothulas almost laughed. Why was _he_ impatient? How _had_ he been hooked into this job? He had zero showmanship and, it seemed, no interest in developing any.

Prowl nodded. "I think so. Thank you." They certainly had enough to report to Ratbat. They couldn't _conclusively_ say what he was doing—they couldn't prove clairvoyance _or_ fraud—but they had a long list of things he _might_ be doing. If Ratbat wanted them to come back and try some more, he'd tell them so.

Soundwave stood and gestured to the bead curtain.

As they emerged, one of the birds left their perch to land on the counter. "Pay here." He balanced on one foot to tap at a cash register. Prowl pulled out a card.

Mesothulas leaned on the counter next to Prowl. "We haven't gotten any of your names, besides Soundwave's," he said. "To whom do we owe the pleasure?"

"I'm Buzzsaw and he's Laserbeak."

"One of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies."

"You have to guess which."

Mesothulas hummed thoughtfully. "I think you're both the liar."

"Hah! Oh, I _do_ like you!" Laserbeak gestured with a wing. "The cat's Ravage."

"Ravage," Prowl muttered. "All I could remember was Rampage."

Ravage looked at Prowl in surprise. "Hm? Have we met?"

"Not directly. Blades brought you in."

Ravage sneered, exposing a row of sharp teeth. "I was innocent. They dropped the charges," he muttered.

Mesothulas turned and tipped his head to Soundwave. "Thank you for the glimpse into the future."

"Thank you for coming." Soundwave nodded to each of them in turn. "A pleasure to meet you, Prowl, Tarantulas."

Prowl fumbled his card as he put it away. Mesothulas stared, optics round. "_What?_"

Frowning in confusion, Soundwave repeated, "T... Tarantulas?" But then whispered, quietly, in realization and horror, "_Mesothulas_."

The room was utterly silent except for the clinking of the wind chime; and then the sound of Prowl's processor fans whirring up to top speed.

The birds and Ravage silently moved between Prowl and Mesothulas and the door. Prowl's cop training did _not_ like that. He stepped closer to Mesothulas, putting a hand on his back, watching the beastformers.

Mesothulas hardly noticed. "You can't know that," he said. "I've only told that name to _one_ person, _ever_. And _he_ certainly didn't tell you." (Prowl glanced at him. He was the _only_ one? Oh. This was a weird time to get the warm fuzzies, but—) "It has _never_ been written down. It's _never_ been recorded. There's only _one way_ you could know that name."

Soundwave pressed his mouth shut and bit his lip.

"Hold on! Lemme get this straight!" Laserbeak said. "You came into a _psychic shop_ and you're shocked and horrified that you found a _psychic_ in it?!" Buzzsaw cackled; but it sounded slightly terrified.

Mesothulas marched up to Soundwave. Prowl's hand slid off his back. "You can_not_ tell. You cannot tell _anyone_."

Quietly, Soundwave said, "_You can't tell anyone either_."

"Excuse me?!"

"What did I always say," Ravage muttered, pacing back and forth along the narrow aisle leading to the door. "I keep telling you, you've _got_ to stop tipping your hand to the skeptics. Showing off with names is too far. Eventually something like this was going to happen."

"_Pardon me._" Prowl put a hand on Mesothulas again, squeezing his shoulder. "I would like to know _why_ we're being blocked off from the only exit."

"Prowl: afraid," Soundwave told Ravage.

Prowl snapped, "You think?"

"Will not run," Soundwave continued.

Ravage looked warily at Prowl, then Mesothulas. "Okay, everyone calm down. Let's—let's not do this in the main shop with all the windows, okay? Let's go to the backroom."

Prowl grimaced. "Please, not there again—the mirrors give me a headache."

Soundwave added, "His headache gives me a headache."

"No, no, the actual backroom, not the one for customers."

Prowl said, "Mesothulas and I had better be given a clear route to the exit."

"Fine, fine," Ravage said. "Just promise not to bolt."

At the back of the fortune telling room, camouflaged under several mirrors, was another door that led into the four bots’ living quarters. The cramped quarters were filled with the clutter of four people living in a room half the size of a normal recharge room. Prowl stopped with his back against the door out. As soon as everyone was settled, Mesothulas said, "All right, how the _hell_ did you find out my real name? You're not—you can't really be clairvoyant. Not after that awful generic reading you did."

Soundwave, sitting on a couch clearly designed for someone more Ravage's height, frowned up at Mesothulas. "I worked hard on that."

Ravage darted between the two. "No, no, yeah, listen—he's, he _is_ clairvoyant, but it sorta comes and goes. It must've come for the name but gone during the session."

"Ravage," Soundwave said. "Their duty: exposing frauds. Familiar with excuse: 'his ability comes and goes.' They will not buy it."

Ravage rounded on Soundwave. "You let _professional debunkers_ have a session?!"

"I did not know when they came in," Soundwave protested. "They are difficult to read. One: thinks in numbers; other: thinks twelve things simultaneously—"

"A_hem_." Mesothulas glared between them. "I would like my explanation."

Ravage gave him a helpless look, and then his crew. Soundwave nodded, and Ravage sighed. "Okay. All right. Soundwave _is_ a psychic. But he's not a clairvoyant—he's a telepath. The thing is, _everyone_ wants their futures told, but _nobody_ wants their mind read." He shrugged. "Not surprising, I guess. Who goes to a psychic to be told something they already know? So we've—you know—got to spin him like he's a different psychic than he is."

Mesothulas stared hard at Soundwave.

Soundwave stared back.

Then Soundwave said, "Ten thousand seven. And eight. And a little box that looks like it has a compass on top with letters around the rim, purpose: unknown; but related to ghosts."

"Yep," Mesothulas said, "I'm convinced. He's telepathic."

Soundwave looked at Prowl. "I am not saying the number you're thinking of. It's too big."

Prowl shrugged. "That's fair."

"Listen, you can't tell anyone about him. Please," Ravage said. "Buzzsaw, Laserbeak, and I have been protecting him for _cycles_. With his ability, he can't handle being around crowds of people. He'd be completely lost and helpless if he was... snatched up by scientists somewhere, or something."

Soundwave shrugged, as if to say that was a fair assessment.

"We're really careful with his readings," Buzzsaw said. "He gives back just enough from the customers’ minds to make them think he knows something, but not enough to totally prove that he's reading their minds instead of just making really good guesses."

"Of course," Laserbeak threw in, "he can't _actually_ tell the future, just—give guesses that fit the customers’ situations and what they want to hear."

Mesothulas nodded knowingly. Prowl said, "Sixty-five percent positive predictions, give or take. That's how most fake fortune tellers do it."

"Soundwave doesn't need to be Cybertron's next big psychic showman, or anything like that," Ravage said. "We don't want him to be famous. But, more than that? We don't want the public to be afraid of him. If people are afraid—if the _Functionists_ find out about him, and are afraid—then he's dead. Dead or a weapon."

Prowl and Mesothulas glanced at each other, and Mesothulas said, "Don't worry. We know how to keep secrets."

###

They weren't a block away when Soundwave jogged up behind them. "Wait."

They stopped and turned.

"Prowl, T—Mesothulas: have a business; have a job you need to finish. I have seen how important it is to you. Ravage: protective; however, Soundwave: sympathetic. Do what you feel you have to do."

He looked between them both, until Prowl slowly nodded; then he nodded back, turned, and returned to his shop.

Mesothulas waited until he was gone. "Right," he said to Prowl. "Well. How soon can we call Ratbat up to tell him Soundwave's the real deal?"

"What?!" Prowl looked at Mesothulas in horror. "Are you kidding?! We're not telling Ratbat this!"

"Wh—of course we're telling Ratbat this! We're being paid to find out if Soundwave is psychic, and it's abundantly clear he is. Think about the other half of our pay." Prowl screwed up his face, and Mesothulas quickly changed his angle: "Think about the prestige and jobs that will come if we're known for working for _senators_."

"Think about the lab he'll end up in if the news spreads farther than Ratbat," Prowl snapped. "Which it will."

"Exactly!" Mesothulas cried. "Yes, Prowl, think about the opportunity to _study_ him! What if his ability is replicable—think of how telepathy could be useful in our work. Sorting out the liars from the deluded from the ones who are telling the truth—perhaps even sensing if there _is_ an unseen consciousness in a location if we ever run into something like Starscream again."

Prowl opened his mouth to protest; Mesothulas stepped forward, seizing up his hands. "Plus, _imagine_ the scientific papers we can publish from this, once all this is verified and public knowledge. The masses won’t be able to dismiss Soundwave as another hoax like they did with Starscream. You've missed publishing, haven't you, Prowl?"

Prowl stepped back, jerking his hands from Mesothulas's. "You want to _study_ him? Like a lab animal?"

Mesothulas blinked at Prowl, thunderstruck. "That's—such an unnecessarily negative way of looking at it. Don't _you_ want to study him? Aren't you curious about what makes him work?"

Prowl opened his mouth, but for a moment the words caught in his throat. "I... Yes, of course I'm _curious_, but—not at the cost of—no. Absolutely not."

Mesothulas gestured wildly. "Why the hell not?!"

"Because of—of what it would _do_ to Soundwave! Soundwave and Rampage—"

"Ravage."

"—Ravage and—and the birds! Fascinating scientific novelties can't come at the cost of... of people's _lives_, their _well-being_."

"I can name a _hundred_ inventions you and I use every day that cost somebody's well-being."

"They _shouldn't_ have." Prowl crossed his arms.

"Sure, ‘shouldn’t’—wouldn't that be perfect. But some things—maybe sometimes they _have_ to come at the cost of a life or two."

Prowl crossed his arms tighter. "Then maybe they're _not worth it_."

"Not worth it?! _Not worth it?!_" Mesothulas gestured at the psychic shop. "You think the ability to read minds, granted to the public, is not a boon to society equal to at least _one life?_"

Prowl opened his mouth and Mesothulas held up a hand. "_Think_ about it," Mesothulas said firmly. "_Really_ think about it. Consider the implications for society—Cybertron is like a living organism, Prowl, an interconnected network of nerves, and this, this has the potential to _strengthen_ every single connection in that network—at the cost of only _one_ of the nerves. Run the math, Prowl. Is that not worth it?"

Prowl could say yes.

It would be easy. It was such a seductively easy option.

He _could_ see what Mesothulas was saying—the countless benefits of widespread telepathy. He could see a future where his former frustrated cop comrades could solve crimes in minutes—and where the unjustly judged innocents like Ravage could exonerate themselves just as quickly. A future where the slick silver tongues of corrupt politicians like Proteus and Ulchtar were made worthless. A future where nobody could lie to protect a roommate who didn't deserve it. A future—selfishly—where people like _Prowl_, who struggled to understand others and to _be_ understood on the most fundamental emotional level, could comprehend the people around them like they'd never been able to before. Could guarantee that they would _be_ understood. The lives benefitted or saved would massively outbalance the one life it cost. There was true beauty in Mesothulas's bloody math. Prowl could see it.

... But.

He did not want to live in the kind of world where that math was acceptable. He didn't want to be part of a system where beauty was bought with blood. He had joined Mesothulas to escape one cruel system; he wouldn't enter with Mesothulas into another.

"No," Prowl said. "No, it's not worth one life. Not because you're wrong, but—but because I can't allow you to be right."

"_What?!_ What does that even mean?!" Mesothulas grabbed Prowl's shoulders. "Why the hell not? Because a cat with big optics gave a sad speech?! I don't recall you having any objections when it was Starscream!"

"Starscream was _different_," Prowl protested, "he _had_ to be taken in, he was a criminal—"

"Oh, so experimentation on borderline supernatural outliers is okay if they broke the law," Mesothulas snapped. "_Great_ to know that that's where the line is. So all we need to do is figure out what Soundwave did that makes it okay to rat him out, hmm? Considering the company he keeps there must be _something_. You said the cat has a record."

"No, no of _course_ it's not okay just because he's a criminal, it—it's like—it... it's..." Prowl trailed off, horror dawning on him. "Oh, god. _That's_ why Skywarp and Thundercracker didn't back up our testimony. Oh my god."

"Wonderful." Mesothulas turned away from Prowl, lacing his hands on top of his head like he was trying to keep it from exploding. "And now Prowl feels bad for _Starscream_, who _terrorized him half to death_. Excellent work, Mesothulas. A spectacular backfire."

"Is that what you think, then?" Prowl asked carefully. "That when we find something _real_, something like Starscream or Soundwave, if it's scientifically valuable—if it could be a boon to the public, or if we could _publish a paper_ on it—then it's right for us to expose it. Is that it? Is that our only criterium?"

"_Yes_, actually. I think that's an _absolutely excellent_ criterium, as I'd _assumed_ that it was the sole criterium on which we'd been operating for _the entirety of our joint career_."

"Great. Glad to have that clarified," Prowl said. "So I should get to work on that exposé about the Spindleback, then?"

Mesothulas reeled back like Prowl had slapped him.

"What? It would certainly be a public boon, wouldn't it? Unprecedented advances in mass-shifting. Completely novel applications for subspace. Vast leaps forward in non-forged bodily construction—imagine the medical benefits for cold constructed bots currently living with cheap knockoffs of far more fluid forged anatomy. The ability to harvest vast sums of energy that Cybertron's core is uselessly dumping into space every month—who knows how much that could reduce the pressure on our overtaxed energon mines? By your logic, we practically have a moral obligation to release what we know about the Spindleback. Don't we?"

Mesothulas's optics were glowing so bright, they were almost pink. Softly, he said, "You're _threatening_ me?"

Prowl sucked a breath in.

Mesothulas’s voice grew louder with each word. "You're threatening me over this—this _hack psychic_ you just met? This nobody who's doing nothing with his life except pretending he's a fake so he can eke out a filthy little living in a filthy Kaon back alley—you're willing to _b-blackmail me_ for him?"

"No! No no no, god no, I'd never—" He stepped forward, reaching for Mesothulas; Mesothulas stumbled back. Ruby red light dripped out of his optics, rolling under his mask. "_No_, I—Mesothulas, I'm just trying to get you to _understand_. I need you to see why that's not an option. I'm just—I'm just trying to get you to feel a little _empathy_ toward Soundwave, dammit!"

Mesothulas gave Prowl a long, silent look.

Prowl's shoulders sagged. "I wouldn't. I promise. I wouldn't."

Mesothulas looked away. "Let's just get out of here.”

It was a very quiet drive home.

###

The apartment was dead silent. Mesothulas climbed up to the mezzanine. Prowl sat at one of Mesothulas’s downstairs work tables and stared at the tabletop.

After an hour of silence, Prowl pulled out the currency card Ratbat had slipped them. On the back was the contact info of one of his underlings. Prowl commed it, informed the mech that they'd checked out Soundwave and were ready to report in, and scheduled a meeting.

When Prowl had hung up, Mesothulas's voice drifted down from the mezzanine: "I notice you didn't involve _me_ in this little call to Ratbat's people." His voice sounded hoarse. "If you're planning on sneaking off and having the meeting without me, you could at _least_ wait until I'm out of the room to schedule it."

"I scheduled it where you'd hear it because you're coming to the meeting too," Prowl said. "Aren't you?"

Mesothulas didn't answer.

"_Aren't_ you?"

Still no answer. Prowl genuinely did not know if he was supposed to interpret that as a yes or a no. Was he supposed to ask a third time? Was he just supposed to go when it was time and see whether Mesothulas followed? What if Mesothulas meant to come, didn't notice Prowl leaving, and assume Prowl had left without him on purpose? His fuel tank twisted. It wasn't going to untwist until he knew exactly what Mesothulas's plans were.

But he remained silent.

###

When Prowl left for Kaon the next day, Mesothulas wordlessly followed along.

###

"So?" Ratbat asked, all smiles. "What's the good word? Is he the real deal?"

They hadn't discussed this. They hadn't come to an agreement. Prowl didn't know what Mesothulas was planning, or expecting. He hesitated for a length of time that he thought was somewhere between "reasonable amount of time to give Mesothulas a chance to intervene" and "so long Ratbat might get impatient," before shaking his head. "No. He's absolutely a fake.”

Mesothulas crossed his arms and sulked, but he didn't say anything. Yet.

Ratbat’s smile vanished. "_Fake_, huh. Really." He sounded like he was _personally_ disappointed in both of them for this news.

"Apparently," Prowl said. "His three friends—you called them 'pets'—did you know they're people? They pretend they aren't people during work hours, but they are—we suspect that Soundwave's beastformer friends are running the con and Soundwave is just their actor."

And suddenly, Ratbat went from obviously disappointed to intrigued. "Really? Is that so. Go on."

Prowl explained the reading Soundwave gave them—leaving a few of the most compelling details out—and then explained the recent news he could have used to get some of the info and the common cold reading tricks he could have used to fake the rest. He explained, as concisely as he felt like he could without under-explaining, the patterns of predictions that other fake psychics used to appease customers, and which ones Soundwave seemed to be using. He explained how Ravage had sat on his lap the whole time and the moments when Ravage apparently signaled him.

Ratbat went from intrigued to fascinated to baffled. On some level—beneath the numb misery and the anxiety over what Mesothulas might say—Prowl was dully amused at how this supposedly savvy business mech/corrupt politician was completely taken in by a fake psychic. He didn't even know any of the most common cons to look out for.

Of course, Soundwave _wasn't_ fake—at least not in _every_ way—but there was still something hilarious in how Ratbat listened to Prowl explain how Soundwave _looked_ like a fake like he was watching Prowl grow a second head.

When Prowl finished, Ratbat stared at him for a moment, absolutely flabbergasted. He dragged his gaze over to Mesothulas. "You haven't contributed anything," he said, as if he'd only just realized. "And you seem... unhappy with your partner's analysis. Do you have something to add?"

Mesothulas shifted, let out a long sigh, and then said, "Prowl left out what I think are a few rather salient details."

Prowl went very still.

"For instance," Mesothulas said, "Prowl left out that Soundwave accused me of being concerned about being capable of measuring up to his prior work partner. Which—I'm embarrassed to admit, personal as it is—is true." He forced a rueful laugh. "Except, of course, Prowl's old work partner never came up, nor his prior line of work, nor the fact that he ever _had_ worked with a partner prior to me, _nor_ how I might have felt about any of the above. It certainly struck _me_ as a conclusion that couldn't be reached without the benefit of some form of extrasensory perception, wouldn't you agree?"

Prowl's air compressor froze. Ratbat leaned forward, optics bright, nodding.

"Except, of course," Mesothulas went on, "that Soundwave would _obviously_ have concluded that both he and I must have had prior lines of work, since no Functionist would ever _assign_ somebody to the position of paranormal investigator. He could have easily observed Prowl's light bar—he gave us our fortune in a room absolutely slathered in mirrors—and concluded that between Prowl's attitude and his demeanor, he could have been nothing but a cop in his past life. And, as a cop, he would _obviously_ have been assigned various partners at some point. New partners wondering, even casually, about how they compare to ex-partners is so _inevitable_ that, even if I _hadn't_ occasionally been piqued with uncertainty, the mere accusation that I'd been worried would likely have been enough to make me wonder if I _had_ at some point and become convinced that I had.

"Clever but simple use of obvious deductions and basic psychology. The pack of them is intelligent, to be sure. And—if you will pardon my sour demeanor—I find I'm still torqued off that Soundwave actually managed to momentarily convince me that he'd _read my mind_ or something. Like I'm some wide-opticked amateur! And over such a petty thing." Mesothulas shook his head, tisking. "But, no. Far smarter than they look—but _certainly_ not psychic."

Prowl's vents slowly started again.

Mesothulas turned toward him, and he almost started. "I thank you for attempting to spare me personal embarrassment by leaving that detail out—but you ought to know how _rigorous_ I am about wanting _all_ the facts of an investigation made public."

"Yes," Prowl said stiffly. "Of course. I know _very_ well."

Ratbat glanced back and forth between them a few times. Then he nodded slowly. "Yyyes. Well. Thank you. That was _far_ more interesting than the simple yes or no I was expecting.”

Firmly, Prowl said, "It _was_ a no."

"Yes yes, but a very... educational one. I see why Shockwave is always raving about your papers." He stood, holding out another currency card. "Thank you. Here's the rest of your pay. I'm sure you can see your own way out."

Something about Ratbat's dismissal made it sound like they shouldn't be waiting on any more calls from him.

###

They were quiet for about half the drive home.

Prowl opened a comm line. "Thank you."

"I want you to know—I did it because of you. I didn't do it because I think we _should_ have, because I _don't_. I didn't do it because I give a _damn_ about those sad little mechs wasting their lives and potential on a cheap con. I didn't even do it because you blackmailed me. I did it against my better judgment and my better interests, and I did it for _you_. Because you get—_stubborn_ when you decide something's right or wrong, and you don't accept _any_ compromises. And I don't want to do it again."

He sped up, and spent the rest of the drive home a half mile ahead of Prowl.

###

The next few days were as tense as they were quiet.

Prowl stayed upstairs, trying and failing to read. Mesothulas tinkered with his project, but mainly ended up swearing at an uncooperative hip joint. Every time he snarled another invective, Prowl started in his seat, spark jolting, and lost his page in his book. He spent more time out than usual, and came back with more body parts than usual, and Prowl didn’t say anything as the funds on their first currency card from Ratbat slowly ticked down.

At night, Prowl curled up close to one side of the recharge slab, leaving as much of it free as he could. Nevertheless, Mesothulas stayed up at night and napped during the day.

Almost a week passed before Prowl climbed down the ladder, tentatively approached the work tables, and waited for Mesothulas to acknowledge him.

Mesothulas glanced at him, then back at his computer, waiting for Prowl to speak first. After Prowl shifted his weight a couple of times, glancing around like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with himself now, Mesothulas mumbled, "What?"

"We got a call," Prowl said somberly. "For a job."

"... Okay? That's great." Mesothulas looked at Prowl. "Why are you telling me like you're announcing that you've got a terminal rust infection."

Prowl took a deep breath, looking at the floor. "Because the call is from Tumbler."


	7. Case 5, Part 1: Tumbler and the Sparkeater

Prowl had an energon cup in one hand, a datapad in the other, and was paying attention to neither. He was staring out the window at the patch of dusty yellow sky visible between the buildings around Security Services, mentally calculating the exact phase Luna One should have been in, and trying his hardest not to listen to the very stupid argument happening behind him.

It wasn't that the subject matter itself was stupid. They were discussing what, if any, abilities the Matrix had. It was a very important question with massive spiritual, philosophical, and historical significance. There were good points on all sides of the debate. He'd _heard_ good points on all sides of the debate. Jazz, for instance, thought that the Matrix piloted the Prime, and Prowl thought he was completely wrong, but also thought that Jazz had perfectly intelligent reasons for thinking that.

The problem was, the two officers Prowl heard arguing were making none of the good points and all of the bad ones.

"Of course the Matrix isn't _just a rock,_" one said hotly. "If it was just a rock it wouldn't be such a big deal. It's got loads of—you know, powers and data and stuff." He was, in fact, the one Prowl agreed with most. _Of course_ it wasn't just a rock, and certainly wasn't a mere bauble; it was a practical tool with practical uses. It was a massive photonic crystal—essentially identical to an oversized spark—but with a structure of unprecedented complexity, and it was designed to plug into a chest—so just like any spark's photonic crystal, by its very design it had vast quantum data storage space _and_ the potential to hold an absolutely massive amount of energy. It would be dumb to assume such a well-structured tool _didn't_ hold something useful in it.

Except, that wasn't what the first officer said. What he said was, "If it was _just a rock_ it couldn't shoot lightning or move the moons, or—or tell the future. Or spit out fully-formed armies to fight off alien invaders! How many rocks do you know that can do that?"

Prowl quietly thunked his head against the window. The officer had been defending the Matrix by citing every myth, legend, and overzealous religious tract Prowl had ever heard about it—and quite a few more Prowl now _wished_ he hadn't heard.

"Oh, that's slag. When's the last time you saw Sentinel summon an entire army out of his chest?"

"When's the last time we had to fight off an alien invasion? He hasn't had an opportunity. That doesn't mean he can't."

"_Everything you've said_ is rubbish," said the second officer. Which Prowl definitely agreed with. The second officer was absolutely right to deride the first officer's fantasies as the dubious-at-best, laughable-at-worst attempts at historical documentation they were. But then he went on to say, "There's _no_ reason to believe the Matrix is _anything_ except a pretty rock that some idiot stuck in a fancy frame and that even more idiots started worshipping because it was shiny. It's just a symbol. That's it. You could replace it with a cast mold and it wouldn't make a difference. There's no real evidence it's anything else."

Which was hellaciously erroneous! Just because the myths themselves weren't compelling evidence did not automatically mean that the Matrix was therefore worthless. There was real evidence from real scientists who had done real scans that it was _the most complex photonic crystal on Cybertron._ And Cybertronians that were intelligent enough to _invent_ complex modes of worship were certainly intelligent enough _not_ to fling such worship at a rock just for being shiny. Even if later mythology about the Matrix did not accurately record its exact capacities and uses, the fact remained that the myths wouldn't have _started_ if the Matrix did not _already_ perform some salient known function that made it seem worthy of fictional aggrandizement, a function that could at least roughly be guessed at based on its known structure—

Heatedly, the first officer said, "Its abilities are recorded in the _Covenant of Primes._ Are you saying the Covenant was _made up?_"

"Completely! Every word!"

"_Every word_ was dictated to the scribes by _Solomus himself_—"

"Wasn't Solomus the Matrix? How could he list the Matrix's powers before the Matrix existed."

"I _said_ the Matrix can tell the future; _obviously_ if it can then Solomus could too—"

Prowl thunked his head against the window again. He couldn't tell either one of them that their positions were idiotic without both of them thinking that he was agreeing with the other, which meant he couldn't get in on the discussion without resigning himself to the knowledge that within a week and a half everyone in Security Services would think _either_ that he thought blatantly invented folk tales were irrefutably accurate historical documentation _or_ that he was the sort of staunchly stubborn atheist that would go so far as to explicitly reject valid scientific data that hinted at defying whatever non-beliefs they would assume Prowl had latched onto, and so he just had to _endure_ this sham of a debate in _agony_, and he hated both officers just a little bit for making him overhear them—

And he wondered, what would Mesothulas say about the Matrix? Surely, _he_ would have a compelling viewpoint—even if he and Prowl didn't agree about it, Mesothulas's thoughts on the subject would at least be worth listening to, probably educational too—

"_Prowl._"

Prowl started. His energon sloshed out of his cup. "Sentinel, sir! I—didn't see you."

"Apparently not." Sentinel glanced out the window. "Anything interesting in the clouds, Prowl?"

Prowl winced. "No, sir."

Sentinel nodded. "Your report is late, Prowl. That hasn't happened since your first couple weeks here. I want to know why."

Prowl started again. "My—? My apologies, sir, it—it's in progress. I thought I had until the end of the day." He frantically ran through his mental schedule, wondering how something had ended up in the wrong slot.

Sentinel reset his vocalizer. "You do," he admitted. "But it's late for _you_. Especially without any recent big cases to explain why you're off your game."

Prowl was only mildly relieved. "Sorry, sir. You're right. I'll focus."

Sentinel gave Prowl a long look that he couldn't read, but nodded. "See that you do."

As he passed the two officers, the second said, "Sentinel, sir—we were having a debate that we were wondering if you could resolve. Does the Matrix give you any… you know, abilities? Superpowers?”

Sentinel stopped and faced them. "Yes, it does, in fact. When I'm alone, I can hear it whispering to me," he said. "It tells me the names of enforcers who are gabbing instead of finishing their reports. Get back to work."

###

In a dark, tiny, under-ventilated, overheated office in Iacon, Mesothulas slumped over his desk, apathetically resting his arm and head on a pile of datapads and disassembled electronic parts that he hadn't cleaned off in months. He stared at his computer, scrolling listlessly through the same job inquiries he'd been staring at for the last week. Ghost hunting, ghost hunting, question about a nonexistent cryptid, ghost hunting, creepy request to stalk somebody like they thought he was some kind of private investigator, ghost hunting...

All tedious and tiresome. Everything looked awful, everything looked boring. It was all going to be idiots who didn't have the minimal common sense or research abilities needed to figure out that their "hauntings" were caused by an oddly-located fuse box or a gas leak. He was sick of being patient with morons.

Mesothulas scrolled down a bit too far, exposing the notice about the overdue rent for his office space. He groaned and scrolled back up. Okay. He had to do this. He had to work.

Even if _nothing about this job_ was interesting anymore.

Not for the first time, he considered going back to the lab he'd last worked at, if only so that he could do something different for a while. They'd surely take him back; he'd been their most valuable employee. There were only two problems with that: everyone would assume he’d come back because he _failed_, no matter how much he claimed that it was because of boredom; and eventually, he'd get bored of the lab again—just like he had last time—and need to find something else to do.

He didn't _want_ to go back. But it was an easy out. And the tedium of what amounted to routine, ghost-flavored home inspections was becoming intolerable.

Mesothulas glanced at the homemade electronics piled next to his computer: an all-but-finished EMF meter that he hadn't quite welded shut; and a custom talking-board-turned-talking-box, with the letters for the rotating dial on top neatly painted and its inner electronics splayed out. He reached for the box and a set of pliers, but then sighed, moved his hand back to the computer, and scrolled through his inquiries again. What was the least unpleasant option?

###

"So here's the problem." The lead investigator clicked over to the next slide, revealing several surveillance camera photos of the serial robber they were investigating. In each shot, the culprit was just a vague bright white smudge. Prowl glanced between the shots, trying to at least identify the robber's body shape from his silhouette. "Every job he's done has been while wearing one of those super-reflective glowing paint jobs used to blind cameras. Temporary paint job, probably. Since he always breaks into shops that are closed, we've got no eyewitnesses that can give us a better description of him.”

The lead investigator flipped to the next slide, a map with red and green dots. "We know the places he's hit," a point at a red dot, "and the places he's _likely_ to hit," a point at green, "but right now, there are too many potential targets for us to have enforcer protection at all of them at night. We've already warned the targets to boost their own security systems, but he's successfully gotten in and out of two more locations since then, so it's safe to say he knows how to avoid tripping alarms. Right now, our best option is adding cameras that _can_ see past his paint job to the locations he's likely to hit; but guess what budget size the Senate's willing to authorize?"

Someone called out, “Fifteen percent of what we asked for?"

The lead investigator gave him a rueful thumbs up. "These cameras aren't cheap. Right now, our top hope is covering about ten percent of the possible targets and crossing our fingers. Does anyone have a better idea?"

Prowl raised a hand. "What about sonar cameras? They're like, fifteen shanix."

The room looked at him. The lead investigator said, "_What_ cameras?"

“Sonar. Rather than absorbing light, they bounce sound off objects to make a 3D model of the room. Like echolocation," Prowl said. "They have lower frame rates than normal cameras and the footage won't be in color, but we can cover every location and light doesn't interfere with them, so—"

"I've never heard of sonar cameras," the lead investigator said. "Where the hell did you pick _that_ up?”

"W—" Prowl stared at him a long moment, finger raised, paused mid-word, running a mental simulation of how his answer was going to be received. "... Okay listen."

The lead investigator spread his hands.

"No, listen, you're not allowed to dismiss this out of hand until I'm done," Prowl said, "but, uh, ghost hunters use them to—"

And then the whole room was laughing.

"No, stop laughing, _listen_," Prowl insisted; "_they_ think the cameras detect invisible things. _I_ don't, that's obviously _stupid_, but the fact that they're not going to find ghosts doesn't mean the _cameras themselves_ don't do exactly what they're designed to—"

"Okay," the lead investigator waved Prowl down, "yeah, no, no ghost hunting here. That's not happening."

"This is a real tool!"

"Anyone else?"

Prowl sat back, crossed his arms, and sulked.

###

Mesothulas had taken a job.

He hated it.

"Why don't you talk to the ghosts with one of those comm things I've seen other ghost hunters use?" the client asked, following Mesothulas around as he tried to take temperature readings.

"What, a— You mean a spirit box? It scans up and down a dozen open comm frequencies a second and spews out white noise and random syllables?"

The client nodded.

"No. I don't use them at all."

"Why not? How are you going to talk to the ghosts?”

Mesothulas grit his mandibles together. "I'm not _going_ to talk t— My job is to establish for you whether or not they're here, not to _open communications_."

"But what if talking to them helps?" the client pressed. "You can find out what they want. Why don't you use a spirit box for that?"

"Because they're _bunk!_ They're rubbish! They spit out garbled syllables that mean nothing, and Cybertronian minds are so fine-tuned to detecting patterns in nonsense that we hear words simply because we _expect_ to hear them and _want_ to hear them."

The client planted his hands on his hips, indignant. "They say _whole sentences_ sometimes. Are you saying people imagine whole _sentences_?"

"Yes! Precisely! The mind's capacity for making up patterns out of nothing is _infinite!_ Did you know that newforged and newbuilt Cybertronians, ones under a year old, have such poorly calibrated image recognition algorithms that if they're shown pictures of randomly-generated white noise or squiggles of color, they will identify them with absolute confidence as images of—of vacuum cleaners or buses or clocks?"

The client blinked at him. "Huh?"

"They're _useless_! They're not— You can't use spirit boxes to talk to ghosts."

"Lots of other ghost hunters talk to ghosts with them. Are you not as good as them?" Under his breath—but not very quietly—he muttered, "I should have hired someone else."

Mesothulas let out a long, aggravated sigh. "_Fine_. I'll get you a spirit box."

###

For the past hour, Prowl had been sitting in a chair in the lobby of a small hotel. Although technically within Kaon’s legal borders, it was in reality about halfway between Kaon and Iacon proper, on a stretch of highway that was completely dark except for the street lights in front of the hotel. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands squeezed tight together. He was staring out the front doors, watching as headlights drove by.

A trio of bots came in, saw Prowl, and sped up passing him. Once they'd headed upstairs, the bot at the front desk called to Prowl, "Hey. You're making people nervous."

"I'm just waiting for someone."

"I _know_. But..." The front desk bot gestured at his shoulders.

Wordlessly, Prowl peeled off his magnetized police decals and stuck them on the inside surface of a leg so he wouldn't lose them. The places where they'd been stuck were a slightly brighter white than the surrounding metal.

Finally, a single headlight slowed down. Prowl was on his feet before the approaching vehicle even transformed. Mesothulas practically flew through the door, flung himself into Prowl's arms, and hugged him tightly enough to scrape paint. Prowl leaned back to balance their weight.

"At last," Mesothulas mumbled into Prowl's chest. "My island of sanity in a sea of chaos." Prowl hugged him tighter in agreement.

The front desk bot casually found somewhere else to look. There was a reason why this was a safe place to visit.

"You won't believe the client I had today," Mesothulas muttered. "He _insisted_ we listen to a spirit box, of all things. Of course all it spat out was gibberish, but he was absolutely certain he received a _death threat_ from beyond the grave, and now I'm going to get _more_ customers who insist on using spirit boxes; this is just going to make it harder to convince them that they're being haunted by nothing but their imaginations—"

Prowl managed to extricate himself from Mesothulas's arms just enough to maneuver them into a side hug. He steered them toward the stairs. "Why don't you make your own spirit box?" Prowl asked. "Like—one that automatically detects the sounds coming through and transcribes them. If the customers can see an accurate transcription of a bunch of gibberish phonemes, maybe it will be harder for them to misinterpret them as actual words?" Mesothulas tipped his head up, thinking about the idea. Prowl added, "_And_ you'll look more professional than your competitors for having a custom spirit box with automatic subtitles."

"Prowl, you consistently have the most brilliant ideas I've ever heard." Mesothulas squeezed Prowl's waist. "It's almost as though you're my own personal muse."

Prowl huffed and looked away from Mesothulas, embarrassed. "Please."

But he could feel Mesothulas's bright gaze on his face. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

#####

Case 5: Tumbler and the Sparkeater

###

Prowl was awake an hour before the alarm went off.

He could feel the very edge of Mesothulas's EM field against his doors, where he was curled up on the opposite side of the berth.

The space between them felt very cold.

He stared at the alarm clock, waiting for it to go off; and when he couldn't stand staring at the alarm clock, he looked at the talking board, and watched the dial on top turn back and forth between letters without reading what they said.

###

Tumbler lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a suburb of Rodion. The drive was almost silent.

Here was what they knew from him so far: there was a sparkeater in his neighborhood. It had been there for several weeks. Four people had already been heavily injured. All of them had their spark casings punctured or ripped open by what seemed to be teeth.

And Tumbler knew it was a sparkeater instead of your run-of-the-mill mugger with a unique modus operandi because it was stalking _him_.

Tumbler's new place, thank goodness, wasn't anywhere near where he and Prowl used to live in Iacon; but Prowl was surprised to see that it wasn't much of a step up. Tumbler lived in a complex of identical, dull, blocky buildings, doors and stairs on the outsides of the buildings, not far from the hospital where he now worked. Prowl had kind of expected that a mnemosurgeon would be making enough to afford somewhere more... scenic.

Prowl hung back at the top of the stairs as Mesothulas approached Tumbler's door. Mesothulas hesitated, glancing at him; but then knocked.

"Coming! Com—" Tumbler opened the door, then jerked his head back. He looked past Mesothulas at Prowl, and then back at Mesothulas. "_Oh_. Hi. You must be..."

"Mesothulas." He offered a hand. "It's high time we finally met."

"Right? I’ve only ever seen you from a distance, when you, uh—"

“IMD?”

"Yeah. For Flatfoot. But never got within thirty feet of you. Chromedome. Rec—recently Chromedome. Had it changed." He shook Mesothulas's hand. Prowl watched their hands warily. "Thanks for— Thanks for taking this case. Thanks for coming."

Tumbler—_Chromedome_—looked bad. Slumped, exhausted, and unhappy. His paint was scuffed and dull. His optics were flickering terribly—it made Prowl wonder if he was about to pass out.

He looked at Prowl for a moment, then away without saying anything. "Come in."

Chromedome's apartment was filled with clutter and boxes. Prowl had expected the clutter, but not the boxes. Prowl surveyed them as he unstrapped their own container of equipment and found a bit of clear floor space against the wall to slide it into.

"Silver stakes and photonic salt?" Chromedome asked dryly. Prowl froze, not prepared to talk to him yet and especially not prepared to reply to (what he was pretty sure was) a joke.

Mesothulas laughed shortly. "No. Cameras and motion sensors. Until proven otherwise, we think it prudent to assume this 'sparkeater' can be tracked and monitored like any other person. Anyway, photonic salt is way outside our budget." He nudged a box with a foot. "Moving soon?"

"Oh, no no. I just... never got around to unpacking after I moved in, I suppose." From the corner of his optic, Prowl saw him sit down on a couch that was half-filled with boxes. "I don't even remember what's _in_ most of them. I should probably throw them out—they say if you don't open a box the first year after you move in, you're never gonna use the stuff inside, right?" He shrugged. "But I haven't gotten around to it yet."

Prowl circled one stack of boxes, looking for any labels or writing on them.

"See something?" Mesothulas asked.

Prowl started. He hadn’t realized Mesothulas had crept within arm’s length of him. It was the closest they’d been to each other in days. "No," he said quickly. "I just—wondered which ones have _my_ stuff."

Mesothulas's optics brightened. “Oh?”

Oh, Prowl should have expected they'd get into this. "I... moved out quickly, when Tumbler and I—" No, he didn't want to frame it that way. "When I moved to Kaon."

Even for that, Prowl half expected Tumbler to snark at him. Instead, he muttered, "Yeah, sorry." Prowl faced him directly. Tumbler looked unexpectedly hangdog. Or maybe it was just because he was so exhausted. "Your stuff is still around... somewhere. I didn't get rid of any of it. You can dig through it sometime, if you want. When you're not... doing your investigative thing on the sparkeater, maybe."

Prowl nodded. "Yeah. I would appreciate that. Thanks."

###

Mesothulas had never met Chromedome née Tumbler before. He wasn't sure Prowl had even _mentioned_ him before they moved in together. Certainly, if Prowl _had_ mentioned Chromedome before then, he hadn't mentioned at the time that Chromedome was Prowl's ex. Mesothulas could remember the day he'd casually pointed out that he and Prowl had gotten quite lucky on their first serious relationships—as though it was fate—and Prowl had simply replied that Mesothulas was his second.

Mesothulas didn't mind being second. But knowing so little about the first—a mechaforensics investigator from Iacon that Mesothulas's beloved had lived with for who-knew-how-long—was nerve-racking.

He hadn't even known that Chromedome had a visor the same color as Tarantulas's.

Chromedome laid out the investigation like a police case—even Mesothulas could tell that. He described the case the same way that Prowl took notes. Prowl no doubt must have appreciated that. Mesothulas found himself wondering which one of them had trained the other to follow his methods, or if they'd met in the middle—or if they were just that naturally compatible. He tried to tell himself that, probably, Mechaforensics had trained them both, along with hundreds of other bots who probably reported and recorded crimes the same way, but he didn't quite believe it.

Mesothulas hated how easily Prowl and Chromedome interacted, even when Prowl was near silent. (How much more would he be saying if Mesothulas wasn’t there?) Although Mesothulas asked most of the clarifying questions that he knew that Prowl would want and Prowl himself barely said a word, Mesothulas felt like he was becoming the third wheel in Prowl's and Chromedome's investigation.

The case: four assaults so far. Two victims were still in medical stasis lock. All found with their spark casings in various states of injury, from "punctured" to "long open gash," and two had signs of crushing damage.

No consistency in size, shape, or alt-mode of the victims. One was cold constructed, three were forged. No consistency in spark type—two of them had the same, but nearly half the population had that spark type, so it was hardly notable. All four were attacked in their homes. Three had scratches or fuel stains on the window sills, and the windows were found open; that was likely how the assailant entered and left. The fourth, who lived in a neighboring apartment building rather than the same complex, didn't have a window.

There were a few signs of struggle around the victims, but nothing had been stolen and the apartments were otherwise untouched. Chromedome had no idea whether the victims had picked up any forensic evidence off of their assailant; there was only so much he could pick up about the crime scenes when he wasn’t part of the investigation.

Three of the four had roommates. In all three cases, their roommates weren't at home when they were attacked.

Three were still in the hospital; the other was released a few days ago. In police interviews, the two that were conscious reported barely remembering the attacks—mainly the pain. They reported that it was as much an emotional pain as a physical pain: like happiness and light being sucked out of them, leaving grief and despair. About the attack itself, they vaguely remembered feeling compelled to let something in that wanted to enter. Tumbler had examined the memories of one of the conscious mechs—the other declined the search—and a more experienced mnemosurgeon checked the minds of the two in stasis. To all, the attack was a disjointed blur.

"Speaking as a mnemosurgeon,” Chromedome said, “considering that the spark and brain module are directly linked, something trying to rip or suck your soul out of your chest would probably make it hard to neatly convert those memories from RAM to ROM. But of course there's other possibilities—they could have been drugged, they could have been hypnotized..." He shrugged.

Prowl nodded, jotting down notes. With Chromedome and a box pile occupying the one couch, Prowl and Mesothulas had taken two separate chairs. Mesothulas was close enough to nearly see what Prowl was writing—but although Mesothulas hadn't wanted to be within three lanes of Prowl that morning, he felt much too far away from him now. Jealousy, he mused, was an unexpectedly potent aphrodisiac.

"And," Mesothulas said, "Prowl told me you think _you're_ being targeted?"

Chromedome let out a long sigh. "Right, yeah. _My_ experiences. Over the past few weeks, I've felt like I've been… getting weaker. I've felt that—that same... happiness-sucking sensation that the other victims described. I've caught myself in the act of opening a window and not knowing what I'm planning to let in, and forced myself to shut it. I've found scrapes on my window sill that I don't remember seeing there before. I've found scratches on my spark casing."

Mesothulas didn't need to look to know Prowl was dutifully listing each sentence as its own bullet point.

"I don't know why it's toying with me instead of just attacking me like it did the other four," Chromedome said. "Maybe it's doing this to lots of people in the neighborhood—playing with them, tasting them, testing them—and we just don't know how widespread it is yet because, who's gonna go up to his neighbors and say, 'hey, have any of you felt a hypnotic compulsion to open your windows and woken up with monster bites on your spark casing'? That sounds crazy, right?"

Mesothulas shrugged. "Well, ‘crazy’ is a _very_ relative..."

"Yeah," Prowl said.

Chromedome nodded. ”But I figure, you two—you've seen a lot of crazy. You can tell apart crazy from the real deal—like Starscream."

Prowl looked up. "You believe us?"

"Of course. You'd never back up something like that unless you were completely sure."

Mesothulas hadn't realized it mattered to him one way or another that he was the only other person who believed Prowl—until suddenly he _wasn't,_ and _Chromedome_ was on the list. His mood sank a little further.

Prowl studied Chromedome a moment, and then dropped his gaze.

"And," Chromedome went on, "you've got to agree that _something_ is going on here beyond just your average assaults, right? Sure, not necessarily an actual sparkeater—I'm not convinced it _has_ to be—but if it isn't, then it's somebody working really hard to act like one, complete with mind control and directly sucking the joy out of you. And if they're trying _that_ hard, then it's got to be worth investigating from that angle."

"Have you suggested that to the police? Even just on the assumption that it's a normal criminal with some kind of sparkeater fixation?" Prowl asked. "I just—I'm not trying to get out of helping, we can certainly pursue it from that angle; but it would probably be better if the police led the investigation and we supplied what we knew in a consulting capacity."

Chromedome shook his head. "No, they wouldn't listen to me if I tried.”

"Why not? You used to be one of them."

Chromedome hesitated. "In part? They won't listen to me because of you."

Mesothulas _knew_ he shouldn't have felt a twinge of satisfaction when Prowl leaned back—a slight twitch that, out of Prowl, meant as much as a full-bodied recoil. He nearly reached out to put a hand on Prowl, but decided Chromedome didn't deserve the privilege of seeing that—and then wondered whether he'd wanted to put a hand on Prowl to comfort him or just to show Chromedome that he could, and felt worse.

"I'm only tangentially connected with IMD now, when they need to call in a mnemosurgeon for a case; but I got the impression there was a big stir over there after the Starscream story broke. Your name's mud with IMD. And everyone there _knows_ how close we were." Chromedome shifted uncomfortably. "I—I've had to—pointedly distance myself from you, because of that incident. I'd already kind of done that, after... you transferred to Kaon. But in order to protect my own reputation with the department, I... had to _really_ emphasize that I don't have any opinions in common with you."

"Even though you _believe_ him?" Mesothulas demanded.

Chromedome shrank down, mumbling, "Well, I mean... I don't tell people that."

Mesothulas looked at Prowl, expecting him to be just as outraged—but he was still staring at his datapad, expression completely neutral.

"If I go back on that now—if I start calling the police about _sparkeaters_—they're going to assume, oh, birds of a feather, and it'll burn whatever bridges I've got left over there. I _need_ those bridges. The fact that I can work so closely with Mechaforensics has been my biggest boon as a new mnemosurgeon—without that, I'm just a new guy in a competitive field with the wrong alt-mode. My alt's only an asset as long as it lets me connect the doctors and the police." Chromedome finally stopped his (unasked for, Mesothulas would point out) explanation, staring at Prowl—who still wasn't looking at him. Chromedome's optics flickered and momentarily dimmed as he looked down, too. "... Sorry, Prowl."

Prowl set his datapad down in his lap. "Yeah, no, it's—it's fine. I get it. Those connections are important when you're alt-mode exempt." (Mesothulas thought, suddenly, about how many more varied jobs they'd had since Prowl joined him—and how many of them came from people Prowl knew, or an associate of an associate.) "And when we were partners I got used to assuming you were trash-talking me to our colleagues whenever I wasn't there." Prowl hesitated, and then turned to Mesothulas and asked quietly, "I meant for that to sound matter-of-fact. Did it come out bitter?"

Prowl usually didn't ask Mesothulas for a second opinion on his tone when other people could hear. Although Mesothulas was _burning_ with satisfaction, he still felt like it was a privilege Chromedome didn't deserve. "You could've gone a little more bitter and it would have been fine."

(The worst part, Mesothulas thought, was that Prowl _never_ weaponized his tone checks. He wasn’t snarking for the benefit of their audience. If he was telling Mesothulas he meant to sound matter-of-fact, it was because that was actually how he felt about the situation. He had lived assuming that Chromedome insulted him behind his back—and just accepted it as a fact.)

Chromedome nodded glumly. "Okay, all right. I deserve that."

(Mesothulas kind of wanted to deck Chromedome.)

He shifted in his seat. "So. All that, plus, I think that the bots at the hospital already think something's up with me. They've been treating me... I don't know, delicately. Like they think I'm about to break. I've seen them watching me with that—that _concerned_ look people get, you know the look. The pitying one."

Prowl gave Chromedome a blank look that Mesothulas was pretty sure was _actually_ blank. "Yes," Mesothulas said for them both. "I know." Mesothulas should point out that look to Prowl the next time he noticed it.

"I don't know what they _assume_ is up with me—that the stress of the job has broken me? Poor little cop car can't keep up with the mental strain of a serious intellectual job like mnemosurgery? They haven't told _me_." A shrug. "The kicker is they're _right_, though; something is up with me. Except what's up with me is a sparkeater sucking out my life. If I start talking about sparkeaters now that they're _already_ worried about me, they'll think I snapped. Especially with Ratchet at the hospital, preaching atheism like he's trying to proselytize the masses."

Prowl snorted; despite himself, Mesothulas barked a laugh. That sounded like Ratchet.

"Yeah. Ha. If I even whisper the word 'sparkeater,' Ratchet might just tear my career to shreds."

"I don't know about _that,_" Mesothulas said. "He's loaned us medical spark-sensing equipment knowing full well we were going to use it to go ghost hunting. I think he's all bark and no bite."

"Yeah, well, you haven't heard what he's been barking since this Starscream thing blew up," Chromedome said dryly. "And he's not _your_ indirect boss. I'm not risking it. So. That's why it's you instead of _real_ law enforcement. No offense."

"None taken," Prowl said, and Mesothulas hoped he didn't think he was speaking for both of them. "I'd rather have real law enforcement, too."

Chromedome laughed ruefully. "I don't know how good at paranormal investigating you are, because I have no idea whatsoever what qualifies as a good paranormal investigator; but I know you're a _damn_ good crime scene investigator. And a damn good crime scene investigator who's willing to at least consider the possibility of a crime committed by something supernatural is what I need."

And Mesothulas felt even more invisible.

Prowl hesitated, but didn't acknowledge the praise. "It's still early. We should start investigating. Are the crime scenes open to the public?"

"The most recent one is still closed off. But the other three are accessible now."

"Hopefully the residents aren’t at work." Prowl turned off his datapad and passed it to Mesothulas to tuck away. "All right. Our first course of action is clear."

"Yes," Mesothulas said, nodding. "Break into the closed crime scene."

"Break into th— What? No."

Mesothulas had felt awkward immediately after speaking; it was the first time he'd made a joke toward Prowl in days, and he didn't know if they were anywhere near getting back to being able to do that. He felt like they weren't. But watching Prowl synchronize _so easily_ with Chromedome—he felt like something precious was at risk of slipping away. And his anger felt so stupid and small in the face of that.

To his relief, he got exactly what he'd been hoping for from Prowl: a glance of patient, tolerant exasperation. "Interview the roommates and the two that are conscious."

"Well. If you insist."

Chromedome passed Prowl a list of the victims and their roommates, as well as a map of the complex and neighboring apartment buildings showing where all the attacks had been. (He'd known Prowl would want that; he'd prepared that list.) Prowl and Mesothulas glanced over the list together.

While Prowl was probably trying to find a pattern in the attack locations, Mesothulas studied the names and immediately noticed something. "They're not just listed as _roommates_—they're _conjuges._" No surprise Chromedome hadn't mentioned that to them sooner; in Iacon—and Rodion was a very Iaconian suburb—one didn't just _say_ that someone has a conjunx out loud, even in sympathetic company. It was impolite. "Three of the four victims are married. That's..." Mesothulas looked at Prowl. "That's got to be statistically significant, right?"

Prowl considered that—probably looking up conjugation statistics stored in his head somewhere—and nodded.

"It's more common in this complex than average—there's a few buildings together with bigger than average one-recharge room apartments, but they're more expensive, so couples tend to cluster here when friend-roommates or work-roommates would go for comparably-sized apartments with two recharge rooms," Chromedome said. "But... yeah. Even at that, three out of four is unusual."

Prowl added, "Especially when the assailant apparently waits until one of the roommates—one of the conjuges—is out of the apartment to attack the other. It seems like it would be easier to just attack people living alone. The assailant might be targeting couples."

"What about the singleton?" Mesothulas asked. "Maybe they're dating, even if they're living alone."

Prowl looked at the list. And then his optics went a shade brighter. "... Did you know any of the victims personally, Tumbler?"

"Chromedome," Mesothulas muttered.

"Chromedome. Sorry."

"Uhh..." Chromedome's optics flickered in thought. "I _sorta_ knew two of the couples by sight, but not very well."

"The victim that declined to have a mnemosurgical reading after his attack—was he the one living alone?"

“Yeah, actually. How'd you know?"

Prowl didn't answer for a moment. "Just wondering." He stood suddenly. "We'd better—go investigate. Get started on interviews. Come on."

Mesothulas gave Prowl a baffled look, then Chromedome, then quickly followed Prowl out of the apartment. "What? What is it?"

Prowl waited until the door was shut before he turned to Mesothulas and pointed at the name of the singleton.

"Pivot is T—Chromedome's ex. Recent ex," Prowl murmured. "And I don't think Chromedome remembers."

"_What?_ How do you know that? Did he tell you at Security Services?” Mesothulas regretted not asking about Prowl and Chromedome’s conversation sooner. He just hadn’t been able to think of any natural way to bring it up. Had they been talking about their romantic lives? Had Prowl talked about Mesothulas?

“No, after. I crossed paths with him a couple of times when I visited Ratchet for the spark sensors."

Jealousy jolted Mesothulas's system like a shot of venom. "You didn't tell me that!"

"I didn't remember it by the time I got back," Prowl said. "Oh—and I also ran into uh, the cultist with the satellite dish on his forehead, with the giant brother? He told me to tell you he said hi."

For a moment, Mesothulas wondered what the purpose of the change of topic was—to distract him? But Prowl switched the topic so casually and seamlessly that Mesothulas realized, to Prowl, it _wasn't_ a change of topic. He was just recounting a couple of people he'd run into that he'd forgotten to mention to Mesothulas. Chromedome mattered as much to Prowl as some guy with a satellite dish. (So Mesothulas tried to tell himself, anyway.)

"Maybe that's why Pivot and Chromedome have been targeted," Prowl went on. "If the 'sparkeater' is going after couples, maybe it saw them while they were still together."

Mesothulas tried to drag his mind back on task. "Which would make every one of its victims part of a romantic relationship."

"Could be one of those nuts that buys into that 'Primus ordained all cogs in His machine be independent and self-sufficient' drivel," Prowl muttered. "Maybe he invented his own version of divine punishment and we're misreading his intentions as sparkeater-y."

"I didn't think that kind of Functionist extremism was found this close to Iacon. I mean, besides the Senate."

"Not Functionist, per se, but some very Primal neighborhoods. Near the hospital there’s a plaza with a statue of Primus where people leave offerings. Locally famous. They think it grants miracles, apparently."

"Huh," Mesothulas said disapprovingly.

Prowl studied the map and list of victims a moment longer, and then handed it to Mesothulas to store with his notes. "The fact that Chromedome acts like he doesn't remember Pivot at _all,_ particularly when the other victims reported memory problems, is... weird. Worth looking into."

"Especially since he's the only one we know of who's been visited by this sparkeater-or-whatever multiple times. But perhaps we'll find out more when we visit Pivot, hmm?"

Mesothulas trotted down the stairs. Despite himself—and no doubt in part because they were no longer in the same room as Chromedome—Mesothulas was getting excited about this job. It felt like he and Prowl were solving another interesting puzzle. It felt like they were finally getting back to what they were supposed to be doing together.

###

They decided to start with the two mechs who were already conscious, since, even to their varying levels of apathy and incompetence in social situations, approaching a distraught conjunx to ask him whether he thought his comatose partner had been assaulted by a sparkeater struck them both as a little gauche.

At the first apartment, a tired-looking mech answered the door. "Hello, sorry to trouble you in the middle of your day, at what I'm sure must be a difficult time," Mesothulas said. "We're here at the request of one of your neighbors—do you know Chromedome? He called us to help investigate a—another possible avenue, in the recent incidents in the complex. We know you must have answered a lot of questions already, but, if you and your roommate are available to answer a few more..."

The tired mech looked them up and down. "You're the fragging ghost people, aren't you. Why did Chromedome call the ghost people? Primus below."

Prowl and Mesothulas quietly died inside right there on the welcome mat.

"Believe me," Mesothulas said, "and I do not say this frequently or lightly—right now, there is _absolutely nothing in the world_ we would like more than for this to be a totally normal, mundane, not-supernatural entity."

"I was originally trained as a police officer," Prowl said. "_Those_ are the skills we are using now. Tumbler has reason to believe that the assailant is _pretending_ to play out some supernatural mythology—and since the two of us know _about_ that mythology, we're equipped to use that to guess what the culprit might decide to do next. That's all."

"Supernatural myth—_What's_ supernatural about this?" the mech snapped. "It's some _sick bot_ going around maiming good people. That's all."

"Oh, I see," Mesothulas said irritably. He pulled out Prowl's datapad of notes. "And so I take it that it's normal for home invaders in your part of town to—let me look up the exact quote—'suck the happiness and light out' of the homeowners?"

The mech looked between them uncertainly. "... Come in. But I don’t want _anything_ about this to end up in the news.”

"We agree entirely," Prowl said.

###

Only one half of the couple was actually at home. The other, still in the hospital, connected by video call. The tired mech already had a screen set up in the living room and it only took a few seconds for his injured partner to answer. Apparently, they'd been doing this for a while.

The couple wasn’t able to report much more than Chromedome had. The injured mech adjusted the camera to show them his wounds; his spark casing had been hammered back into shape and the punctures filled in, but the former holes were patched with a slightly different color and so were still visible. Chromedome had described them as like bites, and they were the right size for it, but Prowl pointed out that the puncture patterns only vaguely looked like bite marks; maybe the 'sparkeater' had really crooked teeth, but it was possible the punctures could have been made with anything fang-shaped. When the interview was over, Prowl asked if he could see the crime scene, since he didn't have access to the police investigation. The couple consented and agreed to keep the video call open in case he came back with questions.

And so, while Prowl went and checked out the crime scene, Mesothulas made small talk with the couple and felt useless.

Although in nearly all their other cases, the clients preferred to speak to the "believer" rather than the "skeptic," this wasn't _quite_ the first time that Prowl took point in their interactions with their clients with Mesothulas only stepping in to smooth out his abrasiveness. Prowl had certainly taken the lead when they'd done the cult job for Security Services, for instance. And that had been fine. But this seemed different somehow.

Maybe it was because usually, when one of them was doing the interviews, the other was going around collecting evidence; but Mesothulas only knew how to look for "evidence" in potential hauntings, not in an actual crime scene, and so here Prowl had to do both.

Or maybe it was just the fact that there had been so much of Chromedome about—Mesothulas could practically feel him in the room, right here, looming over him and Prowl: the mysterious ex that Prowl was willing to rush to Rodion to help out when things were already so tense between him and Mesothulas.

Or maybe it was because of the tension Mesothulas saw between the couple interacting over video phone—snipping and grumbling at each other, clearly trying to keep their disagreements down to a polite level for the sake of the company. The mech here seemed sad; the injured mech on the other end of the line seemed irritable and restless.

But whatever it was—it made Mesothulas feel even more like a third wheel. Or maybe like a second wheel on a unicycle, spinning uselessly in the air while Prowl did everything himself.

From the recharge room, Prowl called, "Chromedome didn't mention this, so I'm not sure if the enforcers noticed: there's only evidence that the culprit went _out_ the window. The scuffs on the sill look like somebody climbed out, not in. They might have got in another way." Returning to the living room, he said, "The only other obvious entrance is the door, of course. That _would_ explain how the culprit got to the one victim who lives in an apartment without windows." Returning to the video call, Prowl said, "You described feeling compelled to let the culprit in, right? Do you recall whether you specifically felt compelled to let him in the _window_? Or just _some_ way?"

The injured mech frowned. "I don't remember. It could've been the door."

"So." Prowl turned, pointing out the proposed path as he spoke: "The assailant came in by the door, most likely; attacked; and left out the window. We'll have to check with the other victim and the roommates of the other two, but I'll bet the modus operandi will be consistent."

And Mesothulas sat there, kicking his heels against his chair, feeling like he was being left out of his own paranormal investigation business.

"Thank you for your time." Prowl turned to Mesothulas. "On to Pivot?"

###

"Let's hope this apartment isn't as gloomy as the last one," Mesothulas muttered. "This entire case has been depressing, and we haven't even found anything yet."

They'd agreed on the walk over that Prowl should probably handle the greetings for this case, what with his no-nonsense demeanor; and since they'd reached that decision, Prowl had been silently mouthing words to himself, all the way from Chromedome's complex to Pivot's apartment. Probably rehearsing his spiel. He paused his silent practice to process Mesothulas's words. “Of course it’s depressing. Four people have been sent to the hospital."

"Even so!"

"_Was_ the last apartment gloomy?" Prowl asked.

"You couldn't tell? If we hadn't been told they were conjuges, I wouldn't have ever guessed it," Mesothulas said. "The victim acted like he could barely stand his partner."

"He _is_ in the hospital. He's probably not in the best mental state."

"Hm." Mesothulas knocked on Pivot's door.

Pivot only opened it a crack, a chain keeping it in place. All things considered, Mesothulas thought it was a wise precaution. There was a heavy brace wrapped around Pivot's chest, probably to keep him from accidentally bending in a way that would strain his spark casing.

Mesothulas waved through the crack. "We're not here to punch more holes in your spark casing. Promise."

"Hi," Prowl said. "We're here to investigate the recent local assaults. We're not police, we were hired as private investigators, we were brought in to help investigate the case from a different angle." He'd probably spoken a little too fast, and Mesothulas would have to remind him to try to sound a little more sympathetic to the victim before jumping to defending their own intrusion; but he'd left out that they were private _paranormal_ investigators, which was probably smart.

Peering out the door, Pivot's face suddenly lit up in recognition, and Mesothulas braced himself to get yelled at again.

"You. You're Chromedome's ex, aren't you?"

Prowl winced, grimacing. "Yep. Yeah. That's me." At least only one of them was going to die of humiliation this time around.

"So, Chromedome hired you?"

"Yes," Prowl said stiffly. "That is what happened."

Mesothulas barely suppressed the urge to point out that _he'd_ been hired too. At this point, he was pretty sure he hadn't been.

"Hm." Pivot looked Prowl up and down. "Does he still remember that you used to be partners?"

Prowl blinked. "So far, yes. I was... hoping to talk to you about that, actually. We're not sure whether or not it's going to be relevant to the recent attacks, but..."

Pivot gave them each one last wary look. "Yeah. Okay. Come in." He shut the door, unlocked it, and opened it.

###

The details Pivot gave about the case were identical to what Tumbler had reported and what the other victim had described. Prowl checked out the crime scene again, but found nothing of note; the small, spartan apartment had no doubt been cleaned up since the attack. No surprise.

"How _is_ he, anyway?" Pivot asked, as Prowl finished examining the recharge room, without needing to explain who "he" was. "We haven't really interacted since I moved out."

"Oh, I—I didn't know you'd been living together. The only time I talked to him about it, he'd implied that it was a... an imminently-going-to-happen thing, and that was a few days before I heard about the breakup..."

"No, yeah, we were living together. Couple of months, actually.” Pivot shrugged. "S'kinda how we figured out we weren't compatible."

Prowl looked around Pivot’s nearly barren home again, compared it to the lonely empty room he’d found himself in after his first day in Security Services, and wondered what Pivot’s exit had been like. He returned from the recharge room to the living room and took the seat Pivot gestured to. "He's... honestly, not doing well. Not—not because of you, I think. It seems like mainly because this... whatever-it-is has been harassing him. So—tired, kind of unsteady, optics keep flickering from exhaustion, scratches on his spark casing."

"Oh," Pivot said, "Yeah, no, the optic flicker would be due to the mnemosurgery."

"Sorry? From—_doing_ mnemosurgery?" Prowl had never heard that was an occupational hazard.

"Getting," Pivot said. "That's, uh... that's why Chromedome doesn't remember me. Which is awkward as hell, actually—we're working in the same hospital. He deleted his own memories."

"Oh." Prowl blinked, trying to figure out what to do with that information. Why would he...?

To be fair, there had been times when Prowl wished he could erase the night before he left for Kaon. His first few weeks at Security Services, he would have done just about anything to smooth out the turbulence in his emotional landscape. If he'd been given that option during his long drive out of Iacon...

But there was deleting a few bad memories, and then there was deleting a _whole person_ from his mind. And all Prowl could say to that was, "Wow." Wow. "Wouldn't that be... difficult? On himself?"

"Well, yeah. Hence the optic flicker." Pivot huffed. "Someone in Chromedome's department—uhh, you might've met him, Chromedome said you were there when he drove to Kaon to bail him out—"

"Satellite dish?"

"That's him. Great guy—he explained it to me. If you do a sloppy mnemosurgery job, especially if you're needling the nerves that connect to the brain rather than the brain module itself, it can cause little energy surges that can fry some other nerves. Most damage that small doesn't affect anything, but the fiber optic nerves that connect the optics to the brain are so delicate even a little damage can cause shorts that make them flicker like that. The frame rate drop can also cause headaches, even if you don't notice it affecting your vision. He says it’s actually possible for someone with a flicker like that to not notice it—the frames that drop are the frames when their optics are flickering, so all they see is their optics glowing steadily. So, everyone who looks at Chromedome can tell he damaged himself, but when he looks in the mirror he doesn't see anything weird. It's... it's been really awkward, actually."

And _that_, Prowl mused, probably explained why he thought his coworkers were treating him delicately. "If it's so dangerous, why would he try to needle the nerves rather than the brain itself?"

Pivot shrugged widely. "I don't know, but I'd _guess_ it's because it's probably pretty hard to stick five long needles stuck to the tips of your fingers straight into the back of your own head."

Prowl ran a simulation. "... Right." How _had_ he got the needles in, Prowl wondered, if he couldn't reach his brain module? If he'd needled the nerves connected to the brain, had he—what—stabbed the side of his neck, tried to hit the cords connecting the brain module to the spark? Even for a trained mnemosurgeon that had to be dangerous—it probably only took a twitch to miss the target and accidentally rip a zero point into the circuit...

"Thanks for the update on him," Pivot said. "I don't—honestly, I don't really know why I asked. I mean, out of obligation, I guess—we _were_ together a while—but... I don't know, how—what do _you_ feel about him?"

The conversation was drifting into dangerous territory—_emotional_ territory—_talking to other people about their feelings_ territory—_listening to other people as they spilled out emotions because they for some reason thought that he was an ideal confidante while he sat there silently panicking on the inside as he tried to figure out what the appropriate sympathetic phrases were to say in the given situation_ territory—but, cautiously, Prowl said, "Not much." It was true; although he didn't feel _nothing_ when he thought about him quite so much as he felt _numbness_.

"Yeah," Pivot said ruefully. "It's weird, I—just a few weeks ago I was _living_ with him. You’d think there should be some—I don’t know—relationship grief? Is that a thing? Nobody explains how these things are supposed to go. What the hell’s normal?”

Oh—a sentiment Prowl _could_ empathize with: terrified confusion when faced with social dynamics he didn’t understand. “I—I don’t know if I _grieved_—I don’t know the correct word—but I was… not happy. For a while,” Prowl said. “Now I’m in a— But I _still_ don’t know what’s normal. How do people find out?” Almost all close relationships depicted in any sort of mainstream media were either platonic or ended with something dramatic like a lovers’ suicide; more subversive media uniformly depicted sparklingly perfect romances, and Prowl didn’t know if that was wish fulfillment or if it meant he was ill-equipped to ever have a good relationship. He never knew what friends he could talk to about it—if they were sending off signals, he was missing them. There wasn’t anything in the way of _professionals_ on the subject to consult.

“Slag, I wish I knew,” Pivot said. “Am I ‘not happy’? I don’t know. I guess I’m bummed about moving twice in two months, but… I don’t think I’m bummed about _him_. And that’s—that _seems_ weird. It’s like—it’s only been a few weeks, but already, I don't remember what I even liked about him."

Prowl nodded. Then frowned. He looked up at Pivot. "Do you remember _exactly_ when you forgot what you liked about him?"

"Uh. Sorry?"

"This so-called 'sparkeater.’ It sucks out its victims' happiness, right? What about—what about happy memories, too? Affection? Did you still like him before you were attacked and not afterwards?"

Pivot frowned. "Huh. I hadn't really considered it. I spent about a week dealing with..." He tapped the brace on his chest. "But, now that I think about it..."

"Maybe your lack of feelings is related." Mesothulas had said that the last couple seemed notably cold toward each other—especially the victim. Prowl turned to Mesothulas to ask for the datapad where they were taking notes—

—only to find that Mesothulas wasn't in the seat he'd taken when they'd first interviewed Pivot. "Mes—?" He turned back to Pivot. "Did you see him leave?"

"Oh. Your partner?" Pivot shook his head. "No, I didn't notice."

Prowl stood abruptly. "I should go look for him. Thank you for your time, we uh might be back later, sometime. If we need more info. Bye."

He left Pivot's apartment without waiting for a reply.

He'd rushed several feet past Mesothulas without noticing him before he registered the familiar purple bot leaning on the wall. "Mesothulas!"

Mesothulas nodded at Prowl. "In such a hurry you almost forgot me, hm?"

"I'm in a hurry to go _look_ for you." Prowl almost reached for him—but didn't. "I didn't notice you leave."

"I was tired of being a spectator in my own business's investigation," he said. "While my business partner was busy gossiping about his ex."

"We weren't _gossiping_," Prowl said, "we were... okay. Fine. Okay."

They were silent as they crossed back to Tumbler’s complex and visited the third apartment. No one answered—maybe the resident was at work, maybe he was at the hospital with his conjunx. And the fourth apartment was still off-limits. The resident there was probably staying somewhere else for the time being. To find out where they were or how else to contact them, they'd have to ask Tumbler. Since his apartment was more or less their base of operations for this investigation, they headed back his way.

Crossing a lane between buildings, Prowl said, haltingly, "Sorry this investigation is so—well—I mean, it's hard for _both_ of us. But in different ways. So... I'm sorry it's hard for you. Considering how you, you know. Feel. About... things."

Mesothulas grumbled. "You shouldn't even _know_ how I feel. It was ripped out of my brain by a telepath with no respect for privacy."

Prowl was referring to _everything_ recently—to Starscream, to Soundwave, to the uncomfortable silence in their apartment—but if Mesothulas was going to assume Prowl was just talking about Tumbler, he wasn’t inclined to argue. ”Yyyes, I… guess you're right," Prowl said. "Also sorry for... uh... knowing that.”

Mesothulas didn't reply.

Prowl wondered if he should have broached the subject at all. Things were already tense enough between them—and Prowl had never been good at defusing tense situations, except by leaving them. Maybe he should have left it alone. They'd be able to rationally, calmly talk about what was upsetting them once they were no longer upset.

But then Mesothulas said, all at once like a dam bursting, "It doesn't help that I don't even know how I'm _doing_, comparatively. Chromedome is this—this—_thing_, looming, in your past, occasionally crossing your path in places I can't see, like this neon orange ghost, and—I know he _mattered_ to you, at one point he must have mattered to you more than anyone else! But you... never talk about him. Never mention him. Like he's some great secret that you don't want me to know anything about. And that, that's... it's... All I can do is... 'What is it that he doesn't want me to know?' That's what I have to wonder. I know I'm your second partner; I'm fine with _that_, but—you—you're _my life_, Prowl, you're... not to put too fine a point on it, you're the only member of the Cybertronian species who truly matters to me, and I'm... I'm _constantly_ aware of the fact that you had an entire life out there, in this complicated world of enforcers and crime scene investigations and politicians, that I—that I _removed_ you from. You had your place in the clockwork Cybertronian machine and I plucked you out from your surrounding cogs to put you in a petri dish, and for _me_ that removal was liberating, but I fear _so much_ that for you it's simply isolating. And _him_—he's _part_ of that world I took you from, all mechaforensics this and criminals that, and—and fretting over the safety and wellbeing of utter strangers like you do, as if you see this value in every person you meet that I'm oblivious to, and... and..." Mesothulas finally ran out of words, shoulders slumping. "Am I just your second, Prowl? Or, am I also second place?”

Prowl had stopped walking to gape at Mesothulas, vents frozen. And when Mesothulas was done, staring pleadingly at Prowl, optics bright and wide and searching, Prowl struggled desperately to find something—anything—to say.

What he finally managed to choke out was, "You think he's neon orange? I've always thought he was—you know—duller."

Mesothulas leaned back for a moment, but then hastily said, "No no—it's the _symbolism_ of being a neon orange ghost; he's a specter, but also very obvious and obtrusive."

"Oh. Okay, got it."

"Also he _is_ orange, but."

There were no words for how fortunate Prowl was to have someone so patiently willing to let him communicate in his own way. "Well... I— There's a... there's a whole lot there."

"Yeah." Mesothulas winced at himself. "That's about three times what I was planning to say."

"But..." Prowl latched on to one salient point; he could start there, at least. "But no, there's no _big secret_ I'm keeping about Tumbler. I just... think it's crass to, uh, complain about one's ex."

"_Would_ it be complaining?" Prowl thought Mesothulas sounded hopeful.

Prowl grimaced, looking up. "I mean... there's a reason we're exes. I didn't move to Kaon without taking any of my belongings because it ended cordially.”

Mesothulas slowly nodded. "Okay," he said. "I suppose it's marginally comforting that you would, apparently, feel inclined to complain about him if you said anything at all."

They started walking again. Prowl meant to say something about how Mesothulas wasn't a second choice, about how he'd had the option to stay in his own world or join Mesothulas in his and he'd chosen Mesothulas's because he preferred it; instead, what he said was, "It's—the thing is, the only reason—I don't know about only reason, but the _main_ reason I stayed with Tumbler so long is because... he was the first person who tolerated me. Which was—monumental, for me. I'd—never been tolerated before. 'Barely put up with, under orders from a superior officer who also barely put up with me' was what I expected as... as the height of positive attention. He tolerated me enough to both live _and_ work with me, and to pick out one or two traits he could feel affectionate toward me for. That tolerance—learning I _could_ be tolerated, if I found the right people—might honestly have saved me from a life completely alone. And I'm always going to be grateful to Tumbler for giving me that. So—so no, I don't want to speak badly of him."

Prowl looked at his feet, idly measuring the distances between stripes painted on the asphalt ground, and found he’d stopped walking again. "But tolerance is a very, very low standard to hold a relationship to. And, I don't miss the part of my life when I believed I could _only_ ever hope to be tolerated." He took a deep vent in, feeling Mesothulas's gaze against his face. "So, yes—Tumbler was four stars out of four when I was used to one-star interpersonal relationships. But that was before I learned that the scale actually goes to ten. And I don't—I don't want you to... compare his 4/4 to your 8/10 and wonder why he's at 100% while you're at 80%. You've got four points on him." His voice was so tense it was almost trembling. It was _hard_, saying kind things. He always feared that he didn't sound sincere. His voice wasn’t built for sincerity. Indirect and roundabout kindnesses didn't need to sound sincere, but even with them he was always afraid.

Prowl felt Mesothulas's gaze move off of him.

After a moment, Mesothulas asked, "What do I have to do to get the other two points?"

Prowl huffed, relieved. "Your workspace is an absolute mess and when I try to find things in your mess it moves, and the magnet in your moral compass is a dud. No other complaints, really."

"Hm." Mesothulas was quiet a moment. "You know what, I like the number eight. Eight is a great number."

Prowl felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth for the first time in weeks.

As they climbed the stairs to Tumbler's apartment, Mesothulas asked solemnly, "How much does it bother you, that you've got that compass and I don't?" Prowl's smile faded.

Mesothulas stopped, looked at Tumbler’s door, and then looked back at Prowl. “Oh, screw him,” he muttered. “He can wait a couple of hours. This thing attacks at night, right? Nothing’s going to happen for hours. Let’s—let’s go get lunch. Let’s compare notes.”

Prowl grimaced. “We’ve been together all day; you’ve seen everything I’ve seen. Except for a little revelation I had with Pivot, and I don’t think that would take more than two minutes to explain.”

“So then we can brainstorm! Come, Prowl, please.” Mesothulas seized one of Prowl’s hands, making him start. “I want to hear your insights on the case.” He rubbed his thumbs on each side of the hinge along the back of Prowl’s hand. “I want to _talk_ to you.”

Oh. That was different.

Prowl had felt like his nerves had been tied in knots since Kaon. And, for the first time in weeks, they loosened a little.

He closed his fingers around Mesothulas’s. “I used to work around here a lot. I know some local places,” he said. “Wanna see the bar where we found a kidnapped senator strung up?”

Mesothulas’s optics curved in a smile.

###

"I don't know where the bot whose apartment is still an active crime scene is staying right now," Chromedome said. "I can probably ask around and find out, though."

"If you'd please," Prowl said.

Prowl and Mesothulas had been out longer than it technically should have taken just to grab a couple of drinks, and figured out nothing of note about the case. Nevertheless, they both felt better about it. Prowl had commed Mesothulas an image from his saved memories of the injured mech’s punctured spark casing—marked up with numbers and measurements—and Mesothulas had compared them to his personal images of Starscream’s spark casing. Mainly for his own amusement, but half hoping to see whether Starscream’s spark casing appeared to be unusually durable. Prowl had watched as he’d doodled casing designs for his masterpiece-in-progress.

"In the meantime, we should set these up." Mesothulas rummaged through their box of supplies for the cameras and motion sensors. "We don't have enough to cover every wall with a door and window. Based on the layout of the complex, mathematically, what's the best place to position them to maximize coverage?"

"Legally, we can't set up surveillance over any apartment but Tumbler's without the stated consent of either the residents or the property manager."

"Well—hypothetically, what would get us optimum coverage?"

"... I'll show you later." Prowl took the camera and motion sensors Mesothulas handed him and turned toward Chromedome. "It _is_ alright if we set up cameras around your door and windows? We can stay as surveillance the first night, if you want—that’s our general policy—but we can’t stay more nights than that.”

“We tried staying multiple nights during a case recently,” Mesothulas said cheerily. “It was the worst.”

“Yeah—yeah, sure. Think I’d like someone else here for a night,” Chromedome said. “And go ahead with the cameras. Just don't put them inside."

Prowl nodded. "That's no problem."

Mesothulas stood with way too many cameras in his arms. "Let's get to it."

###

Mesothulas stood beside Chromedome's building, looking at his windows.

Here was a problem: Chromedome was on the fourth floor.

Now, Mesothulas could look around for a ladder to borrow. Perhaps see if there was a maintenance building he could break into. Or he could go back inside, open the windows, and sit on the window sills to install the cameras.

Or. _Or._

Mesothulas looked around to make sure no one was watching.

With a hiss of effort that turned into a low growl of pain, he pulled open a sealed subspace pocket on the back of one arm, pointed up, and shot a line of webbing at the edge of the roof above Chromedome's windows. It caught. He sealed the pocket, squeezed the cameras between his legs, grabbed the dangling line, and started climbing.

Or tried.

Guh. He was _not_ built to do this in this mode.

He made slow progress. Every time he gained a little slack, he tangled the sticky line around his waist and hips to keep him from dropping back to the ground if he lost his grip; and eventually, he made it up to the fourth floor. And he only dropped two cameras. Not bad at all. Yes, this was _definitely_ the superior option to walking back up the stairs and installing the cameras by leaning out the windows. From here, he was at the _perfect_ vantage point to install cameras and motion sensors facing... the living room window...

Mesothulas looked at the recharge room window. The recharge room window where the thing they were trying to catch on camera liked to go in and out. The recharge window that was fifteen feet to his side. Ah. Right.

"Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

Mesothulas flinched. He dropped another camera. He twisted around and looked down to see an _unusually large_ enforcer dodge out of the way of the camera. "Oh scrap."

"Get down here!"

"I'm just—" He held out one of his remaining cameras, waving it demonstrably. "Increased security for the complex."

"_I'm_ the increased security for the complex," the enforcer said. "And I wasn't notified of any camera installations. Who hired you?"

"... Ah..." Mesothulas had no idea who the property manager here was. He doubted the name Chromedome would mean anything to this officer.

"I said _get down here._"

Mesothulas flailed, trying to jerk some of the sticky webbing off his hips. "Would you believe me if I told you I couldn't, officer?"

"Not really."

"I was afraid of that," Mesothulas sighed.

The enforcer pulled out—oh, for goodness' sake, he had a _real_ grappling hook, what enforcer needed a grappling hook?—shot it to latch on the roofline beside Mesothulas, and began reeling himself up. Oh please no, Prowl was going to murder him if he got arrested—

"What in the world is going on?"

Mesothulas looked down at Prowl. Prowl looked up at Mesothulas dangling from a wad of webbing, moved down to take in the enforcer climbing up to meet him, and then the broken cameras on the ground. Mesothulas wasn't sure if he was relieved or mortified.

"Prowl!" Mesothulas cried. "Tell him I'm supposed to be here!"

The enforcer said, "Prowl?"

"Orion Pass?"

"It's Pax."

"Right."

Mesothulas looked between them in disbelief. "How do you _know_ so many people?" How did he know so many people but remember none of their names? Was that the trade-off?

Orion pointed at Mesothulas. "Is he supposed to be here?"

"_Yes!_"

"I'm asking Prowl."

"Yes, he's with me," Prowl said. "We're here on Tumbler's request. He wanted us to look into the incidents around here from another angle."

"_And_ secure his apartment," Mesothulas snapped.

Orion looked between them, then released his grappling hook and dropped to the ground. Mesothulas sighed in relief. Orion asked, "Well? Found anything notable yet?"

"Maybe," Prowl said. "It wasn't something Tumbler mentioned, so I wasn't sure if the enforcers had realized it—did you note that it looked like the culprit only climbed out through the windows, not in?"

Orion nodded. "Got that."

"Did you also find that it seems like the whatever-it-is that's 'sucking happiness and light' out of the victims is also taking their affection for other people? At least their affection for whoever they're closest to—maybe for other people as well."

He hesitated. "No. I don't think we noticed that."

"We haven't _proven_ it, but it seems highly probable. Probable enough to look into further."

"We already knew the culprit's taking positive emotions, though. If this _is_ true, it helps us because...?"

Prowl jerked one shoulder up in a shrug. "Hints at potential motives? Might reveal something about the method?"

"It's not a lot more to go on." Orion sighed. "Anything else?"

"Not yet. But we've been on this for less than a day."

"Good luck. If you find anything, we've got a couple officers from the Rodion department patrolling at all hours. Flag us down at any time."

Prowl nodded. "Will do."

When Orion had gone on his way, Prowl looked at Mesothulas, gestured at all of him, and said, "_Why?_"

"To put up the cameras?"

"Like _that?_"

"It's more fun this way," Mesothulas lied.

Prowl looked at the broken cameras, then back up at Mesothulas. "Okay," he said. "Just don't drop any more."

"Of course," Mesothulas agreed cheerily. As Prowl turned to go back up the stairs, Mesothulas said, "Could you do me a small favor, though?"

"Yes?"

Mesothulas gave Prowl the most pitiable look he could. "Could you let me in the window?"

###

"You keep calling him 'Tumbler,' by the way," Mesothulas said, as Prowl pulled him in the window.

Prowl grimaced. "Right. I'm going to do that for a while. Chr—uh—Crom...ium...?"

"Chromedome."

"Right. Thank you."

Mesothulas couldn't help but remember how, when Prowl had first learned _his_ real name, he'd repeated it to himself, over and over, to ensure he didn't forget it.


	8. Case 5, Part 2: Tumbler and the Sparkeater

"So, I got the other two mechs' contact info," Chromedome said, when Prowl and Mesothulas had finished installing the cameras. "But considering how late it's getting, you probably don't wanna contact them tonight."

"No, probably not." Prowl glanced at Mesothulas. "But, under the circumstances, we _should_..."

"Oh, I agree entirely." Mesothulas paused. "Dibs."

"What? No."

"After _last_ time..."

"Irrelevant."

"Plus, it's my turn."

"Even more irrelevant. We've never taken turns before. My training—"

"—is better utilized where _any_ potential victims—"

"Under _those_ circumstances, I'd yell for the enforcers. _You_ could do that much."

"_Prowl,_" Mesothulas whined, "I don't _want_ you to have to be—"

"I don't want _you_ to have to," Prowl said.

Mesothulas fumed. Well, there was no arguing with _that._ "Give me one good reason."

Prowl gestured at a stack of boxes.

Mesothulas fumed harder. "Fine. _If_ you take the first round. You're better at it anyway."

Prowl considered the terms, and then slowly nodded. "All right. That's fair." He nodded farewell to Mesothulas and Chromedome and headed outside.

Chromedome stared at the door. "Wwwhat did we agree on, here?"

“The first patrol,” Mesothulas said.

Chromedome stared some more. “Sorry, the first patrol of _what?_”

Mesothulas rewound their conversation a bit. Oh, he supposed that _was_ a bit obscure. ”Obviously, we need to keep a lookout for anything strange happening here—but since we _know_ you're being targeted, one of us should be standing guard in here tonight. Prowl's the only one of the two of us who has any training in protecting people, _and_ he needs to go through his old things, so he's standing guard while I patrol the complex checking for anything suspicious.”

“Oh! Yeah. Obviously,” Chromedome said uncertainly. “What’s the, uh… why are you here and he’s not, then?”

“I’d rather Prowl _not_ be around—" his ex, alone, "—a sparkeater's known grazing grounds," especially after what happened the last time Prowl was standing guard alone in somebody's apartment, "so as a compromise he's taking the first round of patrols, and you get to enjoy _my_ delightful presence." He flopped sideways into an available chair, legs dangling over an arm rest.

"And, you worked all that out with a bunch of half sentences?"

"Well, obviously, you didn't _hear_ the other half," Mesothulas said reasonably. "We've been working on developing our telepathic communication together in case the portal closes while one of us is exploring Infraspace and the other one's in the real world."

Chromedome gave Mesothulas an uncomfortable look. "Uh."

"I'm messing with you, pfff."

"Oh. Yeah, no, I'm just..." Chromedome sat on the half-covered couch. "I'm surprised you _got_ him to compromise. He was always really... really anti-compromise, when I knew him."

Mesothulas wasn't quite sure what to say to that but, "Huh." Because, in his experience, Prowl had no trouble compromising.

Their living space was a compromise—Mesothulas's free-form anarchic mess of in-progress projects and experiments occupied over half the apartment, and Prowl accepted it as long as he had clear paths, all their paranormal investigation equipment safely stowed by the door, and any datapads not currently being used neatly stored in their shelves. The way they ran their business was a compromise, Prowl willing to hold his tongue in the face of Mesothulas's casual mythmaking and playing along with their clients' delusions with the understanding that all truths would be revealed by the end. Hell, he was even willing to compromise over what _crimes_ Mesothulas could commit—Mesothulas had far more latitude than he'd anticipated, provided that his petty grave robbing and black market bargaining stuck to what could reasonably be called victimless crimes; and Prowl was even willing to compromise on the meaning of "victimless."

The only time Prowl ever clamped on his brakes was on subjects where he was absolutely confident he was correct (and, in Mesothulas's experience, when he was that confident, he almost always _was_ right), or where the subject was something that he thought _really, truly mattered_. Something he thought he _had_ to maintain his position on because, to him, the alternative was intolerable. Something like... like Soundwave.

Hm.

The things that Prowl found intolerable—morally, or physically, or psychologically—were, Mesothulas had found, often _unusual_ compared to most bots’ limits; but not more numerous, and certainly not difficult to adjust himself to.

Which made Mesothulas wonder—if Chromedome had found Prowl so resistant to compromise, what had Chromedome expected him to compromise on?

Perhaps he really _was_ an 8 to Chromedome's 4. Even if Prowl did probably like Chromedome's moral compass better, wherever it was pointed.

Well. Mesothulas may or may not have been a better _person_ than Chromedome. But he was beginning to believe that he was better _for Prowl_, and that was all he'd ever really wanted to be.

He could live with that.

But he tilted his head back to give Chromedome a smug look and said, "Well! I suppose that means I'm better at bringing out the best in Prowl, doesn't it?"

Chromedome waved Mesothulas off in mock disgust, and Mesothulas laughed.

"Seriously, though," Chomedome said. "It's probably not my place, but, thanks for—you know—I mean... even if we’re not, you know, I still want good things for Prowl. And I’m glad Prowl found someone who can... handle him."

Mesothulas stared. A burst of anger shot up from his spark, so strong that it almost drove him to his feet. He barely fought it down.

He looked away. "I'm glad Prowl's with someone who doesn't consider him something that needs to be 'handled.'"

Chromedome was silent a moment. "That too," he mumbled.

(And that was the last Mesothulas worried about how he ranked against Prowl's ex.)

###

When Prowl returned, before Mesothulas left, he insisted that they open up a comm line the whole time they were apart, in case one of them was confronted by the "sparkeater" while the other was out.

"I'm _not_ interested in having a repeat of Starscream's apartment," Mesothulas said firmly, "where one of us is all alone, trembling in terror all night, while the other is blissfully unaware."

"I'd rather avoid that, too," Prowl said. "I'll keep my comm on."

When Mesothulas had gone, Prowl asked if it was all right if he went through his boxes now. Tumbler agreed and said that, since he wasn't tired yet, he'd look through them too to help separate his boxes from Prowl's, so Prowl wouldn't have to go through quite as many. And so, on opposite sides of the room, they quietly got to work.

When Prowl found the rare box with some of his old possessions, he stacked them in one of the few relatively clear spaces in the middle of the room. He was surprised to find that almost half of the boxes that weren't his were full of things he didn't recognize from when he'd been with Tumbler. It was strange—thinking that someone he used to know so well had gone on and lived so much more life after they parted ways. That time hadn't stopped for Tumbler when they'd parted ways. He wasn't even "Tumbler" anymore, was he? Chromedome. Hm.

Prowl wondered what Mesothulas would do if they ever parted ways. Was it uncharitable of him to think that it probably wouldn't go terribly well for Mesothulas? He recalled that Mesothulas had been floundering somewhat when he and Prowl had hooked up—not for any lack of skill or ability, but for a lack of interest in his own clientele. He hadn’t been emotionally invested enough in his own business to put in the effort to make it succeed. (Prowl didn't judge Mesothulas for that; he had been floundering too, in his own way.)

Mesothulas might close the business to start some new venture that interested him more—although Prowl couldn't imagine what. There were so many thousands of directions his limitless intellect could take him. Building cryptids instead of hunting them? Inventing new sources of energon? He could track down Luna One if he wanted. Maybe he'd start spending more time with the scientist Shockwave—why not, with his unintended humiliation of them now well in the past?—and _they_ could start collaborating. Maybe Mesothulas would slack off from work to finish his build-a-bot project—it would go faster for him, Prowl was sure, without Prowl insisting he get ethically-sourced body parts—and he'd get a new co-investigator.

What would Prowl do? Go back to the Iaconian Mechaforensics Division? Return to Security Services and try to sway Sentinel away from interstellar conquest? What else _could_ he do? He'd never wanted to do anything with himself but protect people and solve mysteries.

Prowl started at the sound of a heavy box dropping to the floor, and he turned to see if Tumbler was alright. He was—but he'd been peering sideways at Prowl and quickly looked away. It occurred to Prowl—extremely belatedly—that Tumbler might have volunteered to help with the boxes not just out of the goodness of his spark, but in hopes of having a conversation with Prowl. And here Prowl had been absorbed in his own thoughts. Tumbler would probably be annoyed that Prowl wasn't talking to him; he should break the silence. "... Yes?" That worked.

"Oh," Tumbler said, "nothing, I was just wondering where on your pile of boxes you wanted me to put this one."

That didn't seem like something that needed a discussion; but Prowl went over to look in the box anyway, as much to see whether Tumbler had broken anything when he dropped it as to see what was in it. "That's not my stuff."

"It isn't?" Tumbler asked. "It's not _my_ stuff."

"No, I've never seen this stuff." Prowl picked up the dustpan in the top of the box, turning it over. "I'd _never_ get a dustpan. They're inefficient; dirt gets stuck on the edge instead of going into the pan.” Mesothulas had a vacuum that Prowl was very happy with.

"Of course you don't like dustpans," Tumbler said, in that weary voice that Prowl recognized as the one he used when he thought Prowl had said something that exemplified everything about who he was as a person, and not in a flattering way. Prowl found he _still_ didn't know what to do about that tone except shut his mouth and wonder what was wrong about having an opinion on dustpans. Tumbler picked up the box. "I'll dig into it. Maybe I just didn't recognize the stuff on top." He carried it to the recharge room door, elbowed the button to slide open the door, and dropped the box on his slab before the door slid shut.

Which put him out of Prowl's visual range, when something unknown was stalking him. But Prowl was still a bit miffed about the dustpan comment—half because Tumbler _could_ miff him with nothing but a comment about dustpans, and it made him feel so irrational—so he checked to make sure the motion sensors were all functional and hadn't read anything, and decided that was protection enough.

… He wondered about that box neither one of them recognized, and wondered about Pivot’s empty apartment. Hm.

He returned to sorting boxes and thinking about futures after relationships fall apart.

He found the thought of it scared him. Not going back to IMD or Security Services—although he didn't relish those ideas either—but the thought of being without Mesothulas. When he'd been with Tumbler (his only basis for comparison), whenever he'd thought about the possibility that they might break up—and he'd thought about it a _lot_—what he'd dreaded was the thought of being alone. Of being tossed back into the world without a single sympathetic Cybertronian willing to try to connect to him. Of being abandoned by his only advocate.

Prowl didn't need his partner to advocate for him now. He wouldn't be totally alone. He had friends, allies, colleagues, people who respected him—even if that respect was strained. He didn't doubt that, if he ever _did_ break up with Mesothulas, all of the mechs currently looking askance at his life choices would gladly welcome him back into the fold of mainstream society. If he decided to leave Mesothulas _tonight_, he could call a dozen people who would eagerly offer him a couch to crash on, an audial to vent to, and a letter of recommendation to find a new job.

And yet, the idea of separating from Mesothulas scared him far more than the thought of separating from Tumbler ever had. With Tumbler, Prowl had only been afraid of being alone. With Mesothulas, he was afraid of being _without Mesothulas_—without a mech whose brilliance and creativity and energy and love and humor and patience illuminated every corner of Prowl's life—and that seemed so much worse.

When this case was over, Prowl decided, they had to talk. _Really_ talk. Like they probably should have immediately after the Soundwave case. They'd started a few hours earlier—_Mesothulas_ had started, really—and it had felt right, like they were moving somewhere closer to normal; but they hadn't really resolved anything. As much easier as it would be to quietly wait until things were back to normal, Prowl figured that wouldn't do anything to prevent something like another Soundwave from shaking them up in the future. They had to be more proactive about preventing that from happening again. Prowl didn't know what that was going to take—he couldn't offer to back down on his morals any more than he could demand that Mesothulas's match his—but surely, they would figure it out together.

Something crashed in the recharge room.

"Tumbler?!" Prowl rushed to open the door. Tumbler was half-collapsed on the floor, clutching at his chest. Half the plating had been pulled off; his fingers, spasming in pain, were wrapped protectively around his spark casing.

Over the open comm line, Prowl said, "Mesothulas—something happened, get help and get back here."

The reply was instantaneous: "Sparkeater?"

“Probably. Don't know yet." He scanned the room for an assailant, didn't immediately see anything, and knelt to see if Tumbler had any immediately threatening wounds.

"Oh, god—" Tumbler's optics flickered each time he shuddered, one moment so bright they looked like they were going to melt and the next near black, "I can—f-feel it in my spark—it's taking all the light out—"

Prowl pulled Tumbler up out of the spilled contents of the box he'd been going through. He slid his fingers under Tumbler's to uncurl the hand around his spark casing so he could assess the damage. His casing was crisscrossed with a mess of scratches and gashes, but it was still round and still no light shone out of it. Tumbler squeezed Prowl's hand. Prowl let him.

"You're okay," Prowl muttered, raising his gaze to look around the room. The window was still shut. How had the assailant gotten in, and where _was_ he now? Prowl scanned the room, back and forth, mentally tallying up a list of self-defense moves he could use to protect himself and Tumbler depending on the angle of attack.

Tumbler hissed a swear and choked on a sob, rocking in pain in Prowl's grip. "Hold on," Prowl said. "Help's coming, they'll get you to the hospital—Mesothulas, how far are you? Are you bringing anyone? Mesothulas?"

Voice tight with pain, Tumbler asked, "What's it like?"

"What?"

"You and Mesothulas. What you have. What's it like? What's it feel like?"

Prowl's mouth dropped open, unable to process the question around his effort to monitor every direction at once. "_What?_"

Tumbler's hand tightened on Prowl's. He felt needles digging into the back of his hand.

Prowl's back had slammed to the ground before he registered the other hand around his throat. Fingers had curled under his hood and jerked it out of the way, breaking one of the hinges, before Prowl's combat training caught up enough to let him kick his attacker off.

Tumbler's back slammed into the recharge slab; he grabbed it for leverage and lunged at Prowl, tackling him again. "I _need it_," he said, voice ragged. "I'm _sorry_. But it's so _dark_—you can share some light. _Please_."

"Don’t—!”

Tumbler's needles didn't quite extend correctly, shuddering in and out with the flickering of his optics, only just barely emerging. His fingertips twisted up around them, forming sharp claws around the needles—_fangs_, Prowl thought—and he jammed them into Prowl's spark casing.

Prowl felt Tumbler tearing through his files—pulling up memories of happiness, of love—memories of Mesothulas flashing before Prowl's optics—and he could feel the memories corrupting, the happiness withering, the light fading from the images. Prowl tried to get a grip on Chromedome's wrist, to tear his hand out of Prowl's chest, but all he succeeded in doing was jostling his own spark casing and making Chromedome drag a needle over the cords extending up from it. Lightning flashed behind his optics. Even as Prowl struggled, he could feel his memories of _right now_ corrupting before they could properly save. He didn't remember how he'd ended up in this fight. Something happened, Chromedome needed help—and—and Prowl felt compelled to open the door and help him—

Chromedome got a flying kick in the face.

Mesothulas, unfortunately, didn't actually know how to do flying kicks, so he sort of ended up tangled in a pile on the ground with Chromedome and Prowl.

But the needles were out. After a couple of dazed seconds, Prowl's training snapped back into place, and he lunged at Chromedome to pin him face down on the ground. Mesothulas sat on his legs.

And then half a dozen enforcers stormed in, led by Orion Pax.

Prowl stared up at him in a daze. "How did _you_ get here?"

Orion said something in a language Prowl was quite certain he'd never heard before in his life. Half of his brain was offline, linguistic programs included. His head swam. He leaned his forehead on the recharge slab, turned off his optics, and let Mesothulas gently maneuver him up so Orion could handcuff Chromedome.

"No," Prowl said woozily, sitting up and tapping at whatever part of Orion he could reach, which turned out to be his hand and/or knee. "Wait, he needs—he need— Hospital. Something's happening with his spark."

"_Your_ spark about be you should worried," Orion replied, maybe. Prowl stared off into the distance, trying to remember whether he'd just said that Chromedome needed to go to the hospital or he himself did.

"_Prowl_." A face filled Prowl's vision. "Prowl. Prowl. Are you okay? Prowl. You're _never_ allowed to be the guard again. From now on, _you're_ going on patrol and _I'm_ the guard.”

For a moment, Prowl stared blankly at the face over him, not quite entirely sure who he was looking at or why they were important.

And then something clicked. He could feel his face contort in absolute rage.

He reached up, grabbing Mesothulas's helm. "Chromedome _took pieces of you_." He spoke through gritted teeth, voice shaking with rage. "He _stole_ them from me. I can see the memories, but, it's—it's like—he ripped the light from them. It's _gone_."

He pulled up every memory of Mesothulas he could, looking for light, for _love_. It was still there—thank Primus, he still had it. But the memories that had been drained were stark in their deadness, like burned out pixels on a white screen. "How _dare_ he take pieces of you from me."

He jerked Mesothulas down into a hug. His arms trembled with the strain of pulling him in. "I'm _never_ going to let anything take you away." He heard Mesothulas's vents shudder, felt Mesothulas's back tremble with the gasp; and then, slowly, Mesothulas wrapped his arms around Prowl.

Orion politely turned away and shooed the other enforcers out of the room.

###

At the hospital, after Prowl's spark got an emergency patch that would hold him until it could be properly repaired and he was plopped onto a berth in a shared hospital room to wait, his new temporary roommate said, "Oh, hey."

Prowl looked over tiredly. Primus, please don't let him have a chatty hospital partner— "_Oh_. Hi." It was the injured victim they'd talked to via video comm.

"So, uh. How'd that investigation go, huh?"

Prowl stared at him, optics fritzing so badly he could see the room around him freezing for a fraction of a second whenever his frame rate dropped, torn-open chest clearly displaying the temporary patch slapped on his spark casing.

"Pretty good," Prowl said. "We found the sparkeater."

"You don't say."

###

"Good morning! My name is Sunder, and I'm going to be your mnemosurgeon today. I've been told you were _violently needled,_ so—" Sunder's voice brightened. "Oh, hey!"

Prowl turned on an optic to squint at him. "Satellite dish cultist?" he mumbled. "Your name is _Sunder?_" At some point, he was sure, he had known satellite dish cultist's name was Sunder. And he knew that satellite dish cultist was a mnemosurgeon. This was the first time he'd known both of these facts at the same time.

"Inspires confidence, doesn't it? We can't _all_ be paranormal investigators named Prowl." He looked at Mesothulas and grinned too widely. "Hey, good to see you again. You know you're not _technically_ supposed to be in here, but..."

Prowl's head was starting to hurt; he turned off his optic again. He heard Mesothulas shifting in his berthside seat and felt a hand on his shoulder. "I'm allowed to visit. It's on his chart."

"No, yeah, I see, but mnemosurgery _is_ technically a surgery. Non-hospital personnel aren't supposed to be in the room for it."

Mesothulas lowered his voice. "Listen. The last two times I left Prowl in a room alone, he got attacked by a poltergeist and a sparkeater. I'm not keen to repeat the same mistake any time soon."

"Chromedome's not a sparkeater," Prowl protested. "He's—he's not okay, but he's not a sparkeater."

"Well, close enough," Mesothulas said. "Anyway, I've been to med school, I'm... hospital personnel-adjacent."

Sunder considered that a moment. "Yeah, good enough. I won't tell anyone you stayed in the room if you don't tell anyone I let you."

"A fair deal."

Prowl tilted his head toward Mesothulas. "If it's hospital policy, you _should_ leave the room. I don't..." Mesothulas squeezed Prowl's shoulder a little harder, and Prowl decided this wasn't a fight he actually wanted to win.

"Okay, so I'm going to be checking to make sure you've got no lingering damage—corrupted data, unindexed files, that sort of thing—repair what I can, and make sure any damage that _can't_ be fixed doesn't spread any farther." Prowl heard shifting on the other side of the medical berth and turned on an optic to see Sunder taking a seat and sliding out his needles. Prowl had a blurry memory of fingers turning into needles turning into claws, but couldn't quite piece together the context. He turned his optic off again. "We can do this with you awake or in stasis. If you're in stasis, it'll feel kind of like a nightly defrag cycle; if you're awake, though, I can talk to you directly in your head and let you know what I'm doing as I'm doing it—whatever you're more comfortable with."

"Awake, then. I—have a... an unusual brain module OS. I don't know if it would be more difficult for you to navigate than an average processor, but, if you need help..."

"Tactical Augmentation Routine OS, right?" (Ah, of course, that would be in his medical files.) "That's about one in thirty-three cold constructs, I see it all the time. Most of the differences are in processor functions, not memory storage. We've mainly got to worry about taking a different route to get from semantic memory to episodic memory, and not misdiagnosing poor recall of facial features as early onset infocreep."

Somehow, it unnerved Prowl to learn that mnemosurgeons studied how T.A.R. minds worked, although he wasn't sure why. It should be a good thing, shouldn't it? It meant he wouldn't be treated improperly based on the assumption that his brain operated identically to the average mech's. "Besides that, I—have some custom programming that’s probably not in my medical file. I’ve always had it, so I don’t know exactly how different I am from normal bots with the T.A.R. system.”

"Ooh, a challenge. Love it." Sunder shifted again. “Sure, we’ll do this with you awake. If I’ve got any navigation questions, I’ll ask. Can you turn your head away from me? Thanks—that's perfect. Now, what's going to happen is I'm going to slide my needles in through," Prowl felt a finger run along a panel just behind the curve of his audial, "here. It should sting a little. We'll replace that plate before you leave. Are you ready?"

"All right."

The punctures were less than a second of startlingly sharp pain, and then immediately numb; and Prowl's consciousness slipped out of the waking world.

###

"So, I think," Mesothulas had said, laying across the hotel recharge slab with his feet kicking in the air and arms dangling over the side, "if the spirit box is going to have a fancy readout transcribing the gibberish it's scanning and everything, then it doesn't really need to be randomized, does it? When it goes through available comm frequencies, I mean. Since what client is going to check to make sure it's randomized if it's got a fancy text transcription feature?"

Sitting on the floor, leaning back against the slab, Mesothulas's hands on his shoulders, Prowl had asked, "Are you going to tell them it's randomized?"

"Well, if they ask—sure. Of course."

"Then it should be randomized."

Mesothulas had scoffed.

"I'm serious," Prowl had said. "Questions of personal integrity aside—if anyone ever finds out they're not, it could hurt your professional reputation. The bots who believe in spirit boxes think they only work because they're randomized and the supposed ghosts can pick and choose what channels to play, correct? Critics could say your spirit box doesn't let the ghosts choose and that’s the real reason it shows gibberish.”

Mesothulas had sighed, and scooted forward so his head hung beside Prowl's. "You're right," he'd said, mandibles tracing the curve of Prowl's audial receptor. "All right. It's just another component I have to get."

Prowl had turned to face Mesothulas, and had leaned in to press a kiss to his sideways mandibles—

And Prowl felt nothing.

This happened cycles ago, but the warmth had been drained out of the memory. Replaying it was like watching two hollow automatons performing their mechanically preprogrammed motions. Mesothulas's touch felt meaningless.

Prowl was furious again at what had been stolen from him.

"Oh! Wow. We jumped right into the deep end, huh?"

Prowl started, jolted out of the playback of the memory. Sunder was standing by the hotel room door, hands on his hips, looking at the ceiling. "Sorry. I usually try to aim for an emotionally uncharged memory—ease into the private stuff from there. I guess this one's only uncharged because Chromedome got to it, huh?"

"You're in my memory," Prowl said, baffled. He quickly got to his feet, out of the paused playback of Mesothulas's hold, and stared at Sunder. "Why are you in my memory?"

Sunder extended his needles, waving. He glanced back at Prowl's memory of Mesothulas. "Cool mouth on him. I figured he was hiding another boring mouth like yours. No offense."

"No, yeah, I'm extremely statistically average. That's how it works? You see _everything?_"

"You didn't know?"

"No," Prowl said, "I thought you looked at the data of the files—the actual coding, looking for discrepancies and damage. Like—strings of zeroes or missing brackets."

"We actually go straight into the memories. I can see why you'd assume that, though—this room is _covered_ in numbers. Do you always think like that?"

Prowl looked around at the countless minute measurements: the dimensions of the walls, the door, the obligatory hotel room framed print; the rotational velocity of the fan embedded in the ceiling as observed in the print’s reflection; a timer measuring the 2.3 seconds between each blink of light on the comm unit Prowl had left on the side table, along with a string of numbers indicating the most likely candidates for who the voicemail was from. "Yeah. It's always like this. Isn’t that usual for Tactical Augmentation Routine?”

“Usually more numbers than CC bots with other operating systems, but I’ve never seen _this_ many.” Sunder poked at the top number listed under Prowl's comm. The hotel room faded into the background; in its place appeared a floating visual model of Sentinel Prime in robot mode, every joint, angle, and plane marked up just as intricately as the hotel room. “Custom programming,” Sunder mused. "Got it. Cool."

"You're inside my memories," Prowl said again, and asked again: "Is that how mnemosurgery works? I guess it makes sense for interrogations, but—even for medical procedures? Every time?"

"Yeah? I thought you knew," Sunder said. "From Chromedome."

"We don't talk unless we're stuck in a situation where it would be considered socially inappropriate not to," Prowl said. Their surroundings shifted automatically: Security Services HQ lobby. "Unless you mean the attack? I don't remember the attack." Their surroundings shifted again, pulling up a patchy scene of Chromedome's recharge room: stuttering disconnected frames with partial bodies, a claw and a mask and an open chest and Prowl's own hands, shifting in and out of view.

Sunder whistled. "_That's_ not gonna be salvageable." He knelt down, examining the edges where Chromedome's claw faded into nothing.

"I'm being a lot more eloquent than usual." Prowl grimaced. "And unfiltered."

"People usually are in their own heads."

"How did you call this memory up? I didn't see you poke anything."

"_You_ called it up," Sunder said. "You started remembering it, so here we are in the memory. Your ROM recall is still working like normal; I'm just in it with you."

"Oh." Prowl said. And then he was struck with horror. "You need to get out of my head."

"What?"

"I know things you can't," Prowl said. Impossibly long file numbers scrolled through the space between him and Sunder; the background flashed to Sentinel Prime's office, to his warehouse apartment in Iacon. "Classified things, private things—"

"Hey. It's alright. I was assigned to handle your treatment because I'm one of only three mnemosurgeons on Cybertron cleared to be in the heads of mechs with your former security clearance level," Sunder said. "And if you mean private things like the hotel room, I can promise there's nothing I haven't seen. Your memories are safe with me—"

"No! I mean like Tarantulas!"

"Who?"

The shifting scenes froze on the memory Prowl least wanted Sunder to see—which meant, of course, the memory he was thinking about the hardest. Prowl had been in Tarantulas's warehouse at night, watching raindrops pour through the hole in the ceiling, shimmering with so many thousands of calculations to track their trajectories that the lightning flashing behind them was almost invisible. There had been Tarantulas's lab, the more delicate equipment protected from the rain with silk canopies but the rest left to get soaked.

And there had been Tarantulas himself, in beast mode. He had been on a web spun in the shade of the remaining roof, laying out a corpse that had looked unnervingly like Prowl's body in a state a good fifty percent of the way to a full autopsy.

"No, of course I'm not going to use a dead body for the _final_ product,” Tarantulas had reassured Prowl. "He's going to be all new parts, forged quality. Maybe smelting down a few used parts to _make_ the new ones. _Maybe_ a few lightly reshaped if they’re about right already.” He had backed off the web and transformed. "However, studying a real body is of absolute importance to the design process. 3D models can only ever teach you whatever was already known when the models were made. To discover anything _new,_ you have to go to the source." Tarantulas had turned back toward Prowl and smiled. "You wouldn't substitute an x-ray for a full autopsy, would y—"

The playback froze.

Sunder's jaw was dropped.

"That's Mesothulas's mouth," he said.

Prowl didn't mean to say "Yes," but there it was.

"How— What— _How—_"

"You need to get out of my head."

Sunder shakily nodded. And then the memory went dark.

###

Sunder jerked out of Prowl's head and fell back with a gasp; Mesothulas started halfway out of his chair.

Sunder leaned back, hands on his head. "Mortilus almighty!"

"What's wrong? Prowl?" Mesothulas stood and leaned over him, trying to see the puncture wounds as though they'd show him whatever damage Sunder had found.

Prowl's optics snapped on, flickering and flaring like bulbs trying to burn out. "I'm sorry."

"What?"

Sunder leaned forward on the edge of his seat and hissed, "You're the _Spindleback?_"

"... Oh." Mesothulas sized Sunder up, gauging the easiest way to kill him. His chest was pretty well-armored. Maybe his head, but it'd be hard to get in a clean shot to his processor around all that kibble—

"It wasn't on purpose," Prowl said. "I didn't know that anything you think of gets—gets, all—dammit. _Put out_ there, like—"

"It's okay. It's okay, shh sh." Mesothulas had better comfort Prowl _before_ he committed murder, because Prowl was going to be inconsolable afterward. He ran a thumb along the edge of Prowl's helm. Prowl was looking up at Mesothulas with his optics squinted in pain to see. "I know you wouldn't. You can turn off your optics—I don't know how you can see like that." Anyway, Prowl didn't need to see Mesothulas going for Sunder's optics with a—what did he have in his accessible pockets? A few empty graduated vials, a couple of broken camera parts, Orion Pax's contact info...

When Mesothulas looked back at Sunder, he was wearing a face-splitting grin. "Oh, wow. This is— I can't— I don't even know—" He half stood, sat, stood, and sat again. "_Wow._ So is this—this is your disguise? So you can blend in with the population?"

"More or less," Mesothulas said tersely.

Sunder whispered, "And—how many people know?"

"They're all in this room."

His grin, impossibly, widened. "Wow."

"What about...?" Prowl trailed off.

It took Mesothulas a moment to figure out who Prowl meant. Oh—Mesothulas hadn't even considered that. "He knows my name; we don't know if he knows more than that." Please don't let Soundwave know more.

"Listen—it goes no further than me," Sunder whispered. He was trembling with excitement. "I promise. Nobody else will ever hear."

"How can we be sure of that?" Mesothulas hissed.

"Do you think they'd have sent me to look in the head of Sentinel Prime's former right-hand mech if they didn't know I could keep secrets?" Sunder tapped his head. "Do you know who the five most important people whose secrets I've got locked up here are?"

Okay, now Mesothulas was curious. "Who?"

"I'm legally not allowed to tell you."

That was a dirty trick. Mesothulas sat back, sulking.

"You promise you won't tell anyone?" Prowl asked. "If anyone else finds out, the threat to our safety..."

"I _promise,_" Sunder said. "I'll hold it with my deepest, darkest secrets."

Prowl hesitated, and then turned to Mesothulas, optics flickering on. Mesothulas slowly nodded. "Okay," he said. "But if you _do_ tell anyone..." Prowl frowned at Mesothulas.

"I won't," Sunder said.

"Fine." Mesothulas would trust that when it had happened, but there wasn't much he could do about it now. He didn't even have any good murder weapons with him.

"So," Sunder whispered, "how do you... how are you...? Did you start out as the Spindleback originally and create the Mesothulas disguise to hide among us? Did you make a bargain with something for your new shape?"

For a moment, Mesothulas was tempted to try to sell him some story about how he'd fallen in love with an enforcer from a distance and traded a piece of himself to a sorcerer in order to become a mech. But no, not with Prowl in the room. "No—that's—I made my own body." He could see Sunder's smile start to wane—obviously, disappointed it was less occult and more scientific. "... By harnessing the wayward energies of the lost seething moon." And the smile was back to full brightness. "But—as fascinating as the story is—shouldn't you...?" Mesothulas pointed at Prowl's head.

"Right! Right." Sunder's needles slid back out. "Okay, Prowl. Let's do this differently this time. Either I can put you in medical stasis, so you won't have the ability to call up memories on your own—"

"I'd rather not have someone in my head while I'm unconscious."

"_Or_, I can temporarily disconnect your processor from your ROM, so only I can search and access memories. It'll make the process slower, and you won't be able to remember much besides whatever we're currently looking at until I plug everything back in, but we won't have a repeat incident."

Prowl nodded slowly. "Okay. That's—that's fine. If I say anything weird, don't hold it against me."

"I'll have heard worse. Ready?"

"Yes."

And he slid back in.

###

It took several minutes for Prowl's processor to fully reconnect with his ROM, which he mostly spent staring at the ceiling and wondering why his optics weren't working right—until he remembered, and turned them back off.

"How's booting back up going?" Sunder asked. Prowl had glimpsed him carefully cleaning off his needles.

"Just hit 100%."

"Great. Any other questions or concerns?"

He probably meant about the procedure he'd just finished. Prowl took the chance anyway. "How did Chromedome… do that? Get into my head through my spark?" Prowl asked. "That was complicated enough as it was, and you went through my brain like you were supposed to. How can a piece of hardware designed to interface with brains also interface with a spark? That's—that's like..." Prowl trailed off, trying to think of an apt comparison. "That's like something that can interface with both brains and sparks." He heard Mesothulas snort.

Sunder said, "Technically, he didn't needle your spark; it was your spark _casing_. Embedded in your spark casing are what's _basically_ remote pieces of your brain module, designed to read and convert your spark output into thoughts and send them up to your main brain module. It's tricky, and prone to corrupting all sorts of things, but mnemosurgeons _can_ interface with them and from there remotely access the brain module."

"It's possible to needle the cords between the spark and brain too, isn't it?" Prowl asked. Pivot had said that was probably how Chromedome had deleted his memories.

"Yeah—and it looks like Chromedome got you that way when his needle slipped, considering your optics. It's even harder than going through the spark casing, though. Literally stabbing a wire with a needle," Sunder said. "Going for the spark gives a direct shot to parts of your brain module that process emotions, which is probably why Chromedome went for it—but you can also get to the emotional center in the brain module by, you know, needling the brain module, in the emotional center. So. Spark casing is a _little_ dumb."

Prowl nodded. He could vaguely recall the feeling of emotions rising up and then draining out of him. Sucked out through his spark. And for what? Quietly, not quite sure if he was aiming the question at Sunder or Mesothulas or himself or nothing at all, he asked, "Why did Chromedome _do_ it?"

"I dunno," Sunder said, "Chromedome's been at this long enough that he should know going for the spark is impractical. If I had to guess, though, I'd say he did it for the panache."

"_No_. Why did he attack people?"

"Oh! I can't tell you that. Medical confidentiality. Also, ongoing police investigation."

Prowl's shoulders sagged. Well. That was two kinds of classified. He nodded in resignation.

"Anything else?"

"No, not now," Prowl said. "I'll probably have a dozen medical questions the second you leave, though."

"I'll be in my office. You can send Mesothulas."

When Sunder had gone, Mesothulas asked, "How do you feel?"

"In which sense?"

"Let's start with the psychological and work out from there."

"Psychologically, like I don't have a couple dozen frayed memories threatening to unravel my whole brain; but, mainly tired. Physically, like I got run over by a constructibot. Emotionally... I'm not sure."

"Understandable," Mesothulas said. "Perhaps you should try to recharge."

Prowl nodded. "Will you stay?"

"I think I'm going to ask Sunder a couple of questions. But I'll be right back."

###

Mesothulas knocked on Sunder's office door; Sunder called, "It's open!" His office decor surprised Mesothulas—not that he'd chosen to deck out every free surface between his degrees and brain module structure charts with various artistic renditions of Mortilus, but that he'd been allowed to get away with it.

Sunder smiled. "Oh, hey! Is Prowl okay?"

"Fine. Recharging." Mesothulas took a seat across from Sunder's desk and waited for the door to shut. "I'm here to continue a conversation from earlier, actually.”

Sunder's face lit up. "Oh?"

"Not that one," Mesothulas said. "Counterpoints to the confidentiality issue concerning Chromedome: one, he tried to murder Prowl and Prowl deserves to know why. And two: you got our secret for free. You owe us one back."

Sunder considered that a moment. "You know what? That's true." His grin widened. "And also, it's kind of cool, and I want to talk about it anyway. You have to promise not to tell anyone but Prowl, though."

Mesothulas was kind of disappointed that was so easy. It didn’t bode well for Sunder's keeping the Spindleback a secret. But Mesothulas _had_ come here to find out this information, so he wasn’t going to call it a loss. ”Of course. You know _we_ can keep secrets."

"Okay. So." Sunder leaned forward, crossing his arms on his desk and lowering his voice. "Chromedome did it because..." he paused for effect, "... he's sad."

Mesothulas scoffed.

"No, seriously!"

"Come on."

"Okay, okay. So you know how he'd moved in with a bot here, right? And then they broke it off? And then Chromedome deleted all his memories of the bot? He was in a hell of a state the day before he deleted his memories, just—an inconsolable pit of abject despair. It was tragic to watch. We didn't really know what to do—none of us are really _close_ to him beyond being coworkers, and I think most of the friends he had were through his partner, so..."

Mesothulas nodded, completely unsympathetic.

"So, he deleted his memories, probably in a fit of grief—_but_ he didn't delete the grief," Sunder said. "His memories are a _mess_ to look into right now—he's full of this absolutely delicious morass of acute grief, _but there's no source for it_. It's totally unanchored. Psychologically, he can't address it and can't even start to move on because nothing _caused_ it. It's just _there_."

"Hold on, I'm sorry," Mesothulas cut in, "did you just call his grief 'delicious'?"

Sunder sat back, flinging his hands up in a huge shrug. "Some people are into tragedies and horror movies, some people are into sadomasochism, some people like how sad memories taste," he said. "Get off my back."

Mesothulas held back a cackle. "All right, no need to be so testy. Go on."

"_Anyway_," Sunder said. "A lot of this is still fuzzy, preliminary as all these examinations are, but here's what we _tentatively_ think happened so far: to try to cope with this sourceless grief, his brain had to _invent_ a source for it. So it was re-processed as a physical pain—like something was actually inflicting the pain on his spark. Sucking all the happiness out. I've got a _hell_ of a load of error reports I've pulled out of Chromedome's processor from when it was looking for the source of the pain. We're going to be unraveling the internal mechanisms behind the conversion of emotional pain to physical pain for _years_. I'm gonna give _so_ many presentations at psychology conferences."

"Have you ever published?" Mesothulas asked. "Because if you're not much of a writer, Prowl is _quite_ a co-author. He won't allow you an inch of pizazz or intrigue, but he's got the clearest writing you can imagine."

"That'd be a big help, actually. Do you think he'd be interested? I know he and Chromedome were—you know—knew each other." He said this with the obvious vague uncertainty of recent transplants to the Iacon area who hadn't quite mastered the art of making their_ I know they were lovers but I'm not saying so_ and their _I'm actually not quite sure what kind of relationship they had_ audibly indistinguishable.

Mesothulas wanted to say sure, absolutely, as long as the names were changed. But his mind immediately went back to Soundwave. This wasn't the same situation—Chromedome wasn't something _remarkable_ that some lab might want to dissect to replicate—but... "I'm... not sure," he said. "Possibly, if he was assured Chromedome couldn't be identified from the report. But..."

Sunder waved it off. ”I’ll comm you about it when he's recovered, you can let me know what he thinks," he said. "Anyway. I'm not quite sure how Chromedome jumped from extreme psychosomatic spark pain to _attacking_ people, so, at this point this is all speculation, but: you know how there have been cases where Cybertronians on the verge of burning out from lack of fuel will sometimes reanimate with what little energon they have left, go into a trance, and attack other people for their fuel? I think the same mechanism is at work here. His brain module decided it was literally starving for positive emotions and drove him to attack other people to take _theirs_."

"Oh, Prowl is going to absolutely hate that,” Mesothulas gushed, already amused. “We've argued about that—he's _completely_ convinced that that's an urban legend that stigmatizes empties. He's going to be beside himself. _I'm_ willing to consider the possibility."

"I mean, it makes sense to me—it's a survival mechanism, right? If someone's starving to death, the body shuts off anything extraneous and makes a last-ditch effort to find fuel by any means necessary. I think it's plausible," Sunder said. "Anyway: that's the theory right now. A self-made sparkeater, caused by poor emotional coping skills and _really_ unexpected side effects of botched brainwashing. Cool, right?"

"Absolutely astounding," Mesothulas agreed.

###

Prowl did not agree.

After he'd finished chewing Mesothulas out for getting at classified intel and agreed to listen to Sunder's theory, Mesothulas expected him to start arguing about its plausibility. _Especially_ the whole starvation-induced murder trance thing.

He didn't. He just listened quietly, optics flickering on for a few moments when he could stand it and then back off; and when Mesothulas was done, he stayed silent, head tipped down like he was looking at his hands, the corners of his mouth turned down grimly.

Mesothulas stood the silence as long as he could. "What are you thinking?"

"He's probably going to jail," Prowl said. "If he's _not_, his life is ruined. He assaulted four people."

"Assaulted five," Mesothulas corrected.

"Right. I'm a person." Prowl sighed. "This could have... none of this should have happened. Not over someone being _sad_ over a _breakup_. This—this isn't what people _do_ when they break up. If someone had checked in on Chromedome to make sure he hadn't—hadn't damaged himself somehow..." He fell silent again.

"He did say his coworkers expressed concern," Mesothulas pointed out.

"He said they were treating him 'delicately.' That's not the same. That's—that's _avoidance_. Nobody had even bothered to tell him to get his fiber optic nerves fixed!"

Mesothulas leaned back as Prowl raised his voice. He hadn't expected Prowl to feel so passionately about... well... _Chromedome_. Or had _hoped_ he wouldn't, anyway. He told himself it was just that part of Prowl's base coding that drove him to protect people—the same part that had wanted to protect Soundwave, and had even swung around to wanting to protect Starscream.

Mesothulas put a hand over Prowl's.

Prowl started at the touch, but the anger immediately drained from his face. "Sorry." He turned over his hand to lace their fingers together. "I'm... I'm not happy about what's probably coming for Chromedome. If Sunder's theory is right, and Chromedome didn't actually intend to hurt anyone, then—there will be no justice in punishing him. Nobody's wellbeing will be improved for it. And even after everything—you know—_everything_," he gestured vaguely at his own chest, "I still... don't want _bad things_ for him. I'd like him to be happy. Somewhere else. Where I don't have to see him."

Mesothulas snorted.

"I even helped him get this job." Prowl paused. “This job that directly led to this disaster."

Mesothulas squeezed his hand. "You couldn't have known."

"I know. I'm going to irrationally feel guilty anyway." Prowl sighed. "At this point, it would take a miracle to help Chromedome." And Prowl had never believed in miracles. Random good luck, yes—but not improbable blessings delivered in direct response to ill fortune.

Mesothulas didn't either. Today, however—for Prowl—he was willing to be persuaded.

###

Orion Pax had been generous enough to let Mesothulas accompany Prowl to the hospital, telling him to come by the police station whenever he was free to be interviewed about the case.

When Ratchet came by to rewire Prowl's optics, he'd been far less lenient about visitors in the room than Sunder had, and summarily shooed him to a waiting room. (Although he hadn't quite managed to shoo him before Mesothulas had a chance to ask him about Mesothulas's upgrades to his spark scanner. Ratchet angrily informed him that the new features were wonderful.)

So to fill the time, he’d driven to the Rodion police station, given the least theatrical interview of his career, and found himself in what passed for a "downtown" in Rodion with nothing to do. He was unexpectedly unenthusiastic about going back to the hospital now that he'd had a chance to escape it.

Instead, he wandered. And he thought about their recent cases.

Now, Mesothulas wouldn't have cared if Starscream got dissected alive on somebody's autopsy table. He wouldn't have cared if Soundwave had gotten locked up in a lab to have telepathy tests run on him for the next five million years. And he _certainly_ wouldn't have cared if Chromedome ended up in a prison cell with Sunder occasionally visiting to stick a needle in his head in the name of psychology research.

But _Prowl_ cared.

Maybe that was the key, here: that Mesothulas _didn't_ care about these mechs. Not really. Sure, losing an opportunity to study them was a disappointment, but his overarching feeling toward them all was _apathy_, with a thin veneer of scientific curiosity painted on top. Although he was quite keenly interested in their various abilities and/or afflictions, there were a billion other oddities on this world that he could be equally intrigued by. Ultimately, what happened to all these mechs hadn't mattered to him before he met them, and ceased to matter to him once they had made their exit from his life's narrative.

Maybe, if their fates didn't matter to _him_ either way, instead it should matter that they mattered to Prowl.

Because even if he didn't care about being good, he wanted to be _good for Prowl_. Right?

As Mesothulas wandered, Rodion's streets eventually steered him, like threads leading to the center of a web, to a central plaza in the middle of a traffic circle, with some benches and punched metal awnings. On the other side of the street from the central plaza but positioned like it was gazing down over it, against a modest office building, was a godly-looking golden statue.

Ah, this must have been the local monument Prowl had mentioned. A statue to Primus that the locals thought handed out miracles in exchange for offerings.

Well. What sort of a paranormal investigator would he be if he didn't go investigate?

He slowed as the traffic circle took him past the shrine, transformed, and walked up to it. Now what? What was the generally accepted practice? Did he kneel and pray? Feh. Was there a box he was supposed to drop a donation into? There was a shallow pool around the statue filled with shanix, but that seemed a low fee for your average miracle. Maybe they wouldn't be miraculous if you paid a reasonable market value for them.

He looked around for instructions, only found a plaque with the artist's name, and then checked to see if anyone was nearby. No? All right then. It was safe to embarrass himself.

He looked up at the statue. "Hello," he said uncertainly. "I uh—don't believe in you, really—not as a uniquely powerful divinity with dominion over the rest of Cybertronkind, at least—but maybe this physical location is disproportionately lucky or something, so let's try this out anyway."

Mesothulas took a deep vent in. "All right. I just gave all the dirty details to the enforcers, so you're getting the short version. My partner's ex-partner just assaulted five people because he botched some mnemosurgery on himself, accidentally convinced himself that his own bad mood was a literal physical sparkeater, and then decided to _be_ a sparkeater and attack every neighbor he could find with a relationship worth being jealous of, and my partner doesn't want to see him go to jail. So—asking a favor, one god to another—could you... arrange for him to avoid that, somehow?"

Mesothulas squinted up at the face of Primus. It stared nobly into the distance, like the hunk of lifeless, vapid metal that it was.

"All right. Well. If you need anything else, we're all at the hospital recovering from various spark injuries," he gestured vaguely in the hospital's general direction, "over that way—can't miss it, it's the big one they've got Ratchet working at. Good talk, er... lifeless golden statue."

A slight motion behind the statue caught Mesothulas's optic, and he started when he realized that one of the windows on the office building behind the statue was open. Had someone been listening?

"Right! Experiment attempted." Mesothulas sheepishly retreated to the road. Then, just before leaving, he turned back to glance at the building with the eavesdropper, mildly worried that the building behind a statue of Primus might be full of Functionist officials that would take umbrage at mech who professed himself both a nonbeliever and a god chattering at their statue.

He laughed in disbelief. Oh, a psychotherapy office! Even worse. He'd better get out of here before somebody came out to ask him if he'd like to discuss his delusions of omnipotence.

He transformed, zoomed around the traffic circle, and headed back toward the hospital.

###

Orion must have told Ratchet to be nice to Prowl—or maybe Ratchet had looked at the holes in Prowl's spark casing and taken pity on him—because when Prowl was let out of medical stasis, Ratchet was terse and professional and didn't say a word to Prowl about the Starscream incident. Prowl had been dreading that potential conversation since arriving at the hospital; the fact that he wouldn't have to worry about it this trip was a weight off his shoulders.

Once Prowl's optics had recalibrated, the first thing he noticed was a tiny offering of innermost energon set beside his berth, in a graduated vial identical to hundreds Mesothulas used at home. Prowl didn't think his injury warranted that. He cradled it in his hand anyway.

Ratchet had told Prowl that he was cleared to walk around a bit, as long as he returned to his room if he felt the slightest strain on his spark and didn't leave the hospital; so after several minutes working up the nerve, he gingerly got up and left the room.

Unfortunately, he owed Chromedome a visit. A visit with minimal sympathy, and nothing that even came close to sounding like an apology—Prowl had ended up with Chromedome's fingertips digging holes in his spark casing, any apologies that Prowl may or may not have owed Chromedome for any prior infractions were officially null and void—but certainly a visit.

Prowl knocked on the open doorframe.

"Come i—Prowl?"

"Hi." Prowl stepped in, but went no farther, not sure if the invitation was still valid now that Chromedome had seen who it was.

"What are you doing here?"

"Visiting?" Was that a trick question? "I could leave."

"No, no. It's fine." Chromedome gestured at the chair nearest the door. "I'm just... surprised you wanted to."

"Don't expect a second visit." Prowl scooted the chair a little farther away from Chromedome's berth before sitting. "But, I thought I ought to."

"Well. Thanks."

There was a split second of intensely unpleasant silence.

And it was at that moment that Prowl realized why he’d been uncomfortable when Sunder had explained what mnemosurgeons knew about T.A.R. minds; because it meant that Chromedome now knew more things about _Prowl’s_ mind—things that he hadn’t known when he and Prowl had been together. Which was a strange thing to feel uncomfortable about. The entire time they’d been together, Prowl had wished for a way to make himself better understood to Chromedome, and now that Chromedome _did_ have a better understanding of what made him who he was, something about that turned Prowl’s fuel tank. Why? Maybe because Chromedome had attacked him yesterday? Or maybe because, even though Chromedome supposedly could understand him better now, he didn’t act like it at all.

Chromedome nodded at the brace wrapped around Prowl's chest to ensure he didn't accidentally bend in a way that strained his spark casing. "Doesn't look comfortable."

"Yours looks worse."

Chromedome had a similar brace, except his came with a solid unpainted plate of metal that covered his chest. "Oh. Yeah. They already took out my needles, but—safety precaution." He lifted a wrist, revealing the cuff attaching him to his medical berth. "So's this."

Prowl grimaced at the sight of it. “That seems… excessive.”

“You’d think,” Chromedome said dryly. “I’ve already had one… I don’t know, what are we calling these things? ‘Incidents’?” (Prowl noticed, for the first time, the faint scratches on the metal plate.) “It hurt like hell and I don’t even remember it. Primus. All this just because—“ He cut off, glancing at Prowl. “How much do you know?”

“A lot more than I’m supposed to,” Prowl admitted.

Chromedome nodded glumly. “This didn’t happen when we—_you_ moved out,” he said. “Which means it’s got nothing to do with breaking up. I’m just an awful mnemosurgeon.”

“That doesn’t inherently follow from the evidence,” Prowl pointed out. “You were operating on _yourself_, which has got to be far more challenging than doing it on a separate patient. It was probably almost inevitable that something like this…” He trailed off, thinking. “Actually, I suppose a good mnemosurgeon wouldn’t have tried to operate on himself in the first place.”

“Thanks,” Chromedome said dryly, “I feel so much better.”

“Well, that’s what I came for,” Prowl sighed. He forced his gaze away from the scratches on Chromedome’s chest brace; and then away from the cuff around his wrist; and he ended up staring at his own hands, willing himself not to feel guilty.

Someone could have checked on Chromedome when they'd heard about the breakup. Someone _should_ have, when they'd seen that he'd completely forgotten the person he'd loved the day before.

That someone could have been Prowl.

Prowl supposed it had been easy for him to imagine that someone else who knew Chromedome better would help him out. That must have been what everyone else who'd watched him struggle through the breakup and then delete his memories of it had thought: _it's not my place to intrude, I'm not that close to him_.

Mesothulas had said that, according to Sunder, Chromedome had known all of his friends through Pivot. No one was close to him, only to his partner. And when he was no longer with that partner—when he no longer _remembered_ that partner...

Prowl still clearly remembered the vague sense of resentment that had seemed to linger around Chromedome on the many nights when they'd gone home alone together after listening to their colleagues making evening plans. All this time, Prowl had thought that he'd somehow driven away Chromedome's friends when they'd become partners. He'd blamed himself for the fact that Chromedome was alone. Now he wondered whether, perhaps, Chromedome hadn't _had_ friends before Prowl—grateful to Chromedome just for putting up with him—had come into the picture. Maybe he'd expected Prowl to make friends _for_ him—the way that, apparently, Pivot had done here—and resented him when he didn't. Maybe he resented Prowl for not personally supplying him with the social circle he wanted.

It was difficult for Prowl to sort out what he'd deserved and what he hadn't, when he thought about his relationship with Chromedome. Chromedome had made Prowl feel, perhaps unintentionally, like he'd deserved quite a lot of what he got; and Prowl had accepted that because he'd supposed Chromedome was in a better position than Prowl to know. Prowl had only begun to question what he'd really deserved since seeing how he was treated by the mechs who'd come after Chromedome. The mechs who respected him. The mech who loved him.

But Prowl didn't need to check with Mesothulas to know he hadn’t deserved being made to shoulder the burden of that resentment.

Mesothulas. If anything happened to Prowl, would he be in the same position as Chromedome without Pivot?

"I'm sorry," Chromedome said, looking at his cuffed wrist instead of Prowl. "I don't remember any of it—the last thing I remember is looking through a box of stuff I don't recognize and trying to remember where it came from—but everybody's been telling me about a whole lot of things I can't believe I'd do but really can't argue that I didn't, so..." He sighed. "I want you to know that, if I'd been in control, I wouldn't have... I wouldn't have. There's—no part of me that wants to see you hurt."

They had some history that made Prowl doubt that. But maybe it was true now when it hadn't been back then. Prowl, at least, was able to view Chromedome far more neutrally now than he had been a few cycles ago. Maybe that went both ways. "Hm. Acknowledged."

Chromedome laughed weakly. "'Acknowledged'?"

"Appreciated but not accepted yet. An hour ago I had holes in my spark casing."

"Guess that's fair."

There was a timid knock at the doorframe. Prowl tried to turn to see who it was, and found he couldn't twist himself that way with his brace.

"Come in?" Chromedome said.

A slight orange mech with an alt Prowl couldn't peg walked in. "Hello—I'm looking for a mnemosurgeon with some sort of spark injury; I wasn't given a name. Is this the right room?"

"I'm probably the only injured mnemosurgeon of any note," Chromedome said ruefully. "It's Chromedome. Can I help you?"

"I thought we might be able to help each other, actually." The mech stepped closer. "My name is Rung; I'm a psychotherapist. I've heard a little bit about your case. I'm interested in learning more about mnemosurgery and how it can affect people's psychological well-being—and, if you let me, I think I might be able to help you prove that you weren't in control of your actions."

"Great." Prowl didn't think Chromedome sounded terribly enthused at the prospect. "So next time I do it, we'll know it wasn't really my own fault, right?"

"With a little work, we should be able to make sure you won't involuntarily hurt anyone again, too." Rung smiled. "I think, with a bit of help, you're going to be all right."

Chromedome didn't respond for a moment. But then he said, very quietly, "Really?"

Prowl half stood. "If you need to discuss, uh, confidential psychology things, I could..." He pointed at the door.

"If Chromedome feels ready to talk now," Rung said.

Chromedome nodded.

Prowl closed the door on his way out. And let out a shaky sigh of relief.

###

"You're welcome," Mesothulas said proudly.

"What, did _you_ ask Ring to come here?"

"I most certainly did," Mesothulas said in that voice he reserved for occasions when he was telling a lie and absolutely wanted to make sure Prowl did not believe him in the slightest. "I succeeded. Me, personally. I saved Chromedome."

"Oh, did you. How."

"I asked for a favor from that gaudy Primus statue that grants miracles."

Prowl scoffed.

Mesothulas giggled; but his laughter quickly faded. "I've been thinking," he said slowly. "Perhaps this Ring has a good idea about how we should be doing things."

Prowl gave him a skeptical look. "What, you want to switch from paranormal investigating to psychology?"

"No, no no. I meant—you said he approached Chromedome to _ask_ him to teach him about mnemosurgery, correct? A mutually beneficial arrangement?"

"Mmmore or less, yes," Prowl said, nodding slowly.

"Well. If we're going to keep running into mechs like Starscream and Soundwave—_the real deal_, so to speak—maybe that's how we should be handling them: asking to learn from them, rather than simply making a choice between exposing them or ignoring them. It will likely mean we'll be amassing a great deal of research we can never publish, yes; but, truth be told, before you, I wasn't interested in publishing anyway." He chuckled. "I care far more about having the knowledge for myself than sharing it with the rest of Cybertron."

Prowl's skeptical look had moved off of Mesothulas and onto his hands. He was silent for a moment, frowning. "What if they say no? What do you do then?"

"What I do best: wheedle and persuade, hyeh." At Prowl's look, he quickly added, "But, if they're steadfast, then we let it go. There will always be more things to study later. I don't imagine many people would turn down the opportunity, though—surely anyone like Soundwave or Starscream would jump at a chance to understand themselves better? For all we know, studies like what I’m proposing might already be going on in Jhiaxian's 'night classes.'" Mesothulas paused. Prowl was still looking at his hands, frowning. He was expecting more enthusiasm. "Does that meet your approval, Prowl?"

"It does," Prowl said quickly. "Really. I'm just... not sure where it came from. This wasn't where you were a few days ago."

"No. It wasn't. But... I don't want to be at cross purposes with you again. Nothing would make me more unhappy." Mesothulas reached hopefully toward Prowl. Prowl took his hand. "I think nothing would make _you_ more unhappy, either—except doing something that you consider morally unacceptable. And if it means that much to you, then I can adjust my expectations accordingly."

Prowl gave Mesothulas a slight smile.

###

It was another day until Prowl was allowed to go home, and another couple of weeks until he was cleared to _leave_ home. Mesothulas helped him fill his time by recruiting him to assist in the physical assembly of the chronologically sped-up subspace pocket they'd brainstormed while at Starscream's apartment.

But as soon as he was free, Prowl and Mesothulas set out—_after_ the morning traffic—to Kaon.

If they were going to start asking the supernaturally skilled bots they crossed paths with if they were willing to be studied in exchange for a chance to learn more about themselves, then there was no reason they couldn't go back to Soundwave and ask him first. They suspected his friends would have more trouble with it than he would; but they'd already made a list of their potential objections and concerns, and how they would respond to them. (Prowl's idea, of course.) Nothing else for it but to try and see how they felt about the idea.

It was unfortunate that they had to make such a long drive just for a chance to be told "no," but they hadn't gotten Soundwave's comm frequency the last time they were there. They weren't actually sure whether he or his friends _had_ comm units. They wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

As Kaon's tallest buildings appeared on the horizon, Prowl said, "I've been thinking about—if Soundwave _does_ agree—how we might best begin studying how his mind works."

"An excellent question. Certainly, we'll have to start with a whole bevy of head scans. That's going to be some rather difficult to acquire equipment, but..." Mesothulas trailed off. Prowl was worried he might be thinking about how best to steal it.

"I was thinking that it might be useful for us to have someone who can study his mind from the inside."

"Ohhh?" Mesothulas sounded wary. "_Would_ it? I suppose you have someone in mind?"

"Sunder, potentially."

Mesothulas was silent a moment. "_Huh._"

"No good?"

"No no, just—a surprise. Not the first choice I was expecting. Why?"

"He's already into _some_ paranormal subjects, clearly. I don't know if telepathy is in his wheelhouse, but... well, he's a mnemosurgeon. That's basically hardline telepathy versus Soundwave's wireless telepathy, right? He'd probably be interested."

Mesothulas choked on a laugh. "I suspect they'd _both_ be offended by the analogy, but the comparison works for me. I think Sunder's interests lie more in the occult than in ESP, but... hmm..."

"And—well, I think we ought to wait a while longer to be sure he's trustworthy—considering that he's promised to keep you secret, but spilled Chromedome's medical info pretty easily—"

"To be fair to him, I did put him in a position where he could not have reasonably refused."

"No you didn't. But—if he _does_ end up being responsible with your secret, then we can trust him to keep quiet if the research we do all ends up being unusable."

"Hah. I suppose so," Mesothulas said. "Well—it would be worth asking him, wouldn't it? He might even be enjoyable to collaborate with."

For Mesothulas's sake, Prowl hoped he was.

In truth, Prowl wasn't completely at ease around Sunder. For goodness' sake, he’d gotten arrested for hanging out in a mass murderer's cult to watch mechs get executed. Prowl didn't think he was _dangerous_, per se—but he was interested in some very dangerous things.

But then, so was Mesothulas.

Mesothulas may not have been lonely, but he _was_ alone. He himself had said that Prowl was his life, hadn't he? The only Cybertronian he cared about. And what if something happened to Prowl? What happened to Mesothulas then?

He should have _some_ friends. Even if they weren't friends Prowl was fond of. He could get used to a Sunder or two. Or, hell—maybe even a Shockwave.

He wondered if the Starscream incident might have ended differently if Mesothulas and Shockwave _had_ been friends, rather than just a couple of offbeat scientists (or a scientist and a "scientist") who discussed their projects whenever they happened to cross paths.

Mesothulas said, "We can call him once we've spoken to Soundwave." The Kaonite skyline drew closer.

###

The countless neon lights were out when they approached Soundwave's psychic shop, and the door was locked. Mesothulas knocked, and they waited.

The door opened. A furious mass of wings and beak filled their faces. "What the _hell_ are you two doing here?!"

They stepped back; Prowl grabbed Mesothulas's arm. "Wh—uh—"

"We only wanted to talk to Soundwave," Mesothulas said. "Is—is this a bad time? Should we come back when you're open?"

Laserbeak backed off slightly. "You're looking for Soundwave _here_," he said uncertainly. "You weren't behind it?"

They glanced at each other. Prowl asked, "Behind what?"

"You'd better come in."

The darkened shop looked much the same as when they'd last visited it, except for a thin layer of lived-in detritus on the floor—empty cubes, a couple of bowls, some armor cleaning supplies stashed under a display table—as though someone had been living in the main shop rather than back in the private quarters for some days now. Ravage stood in the middle of the floor, Buzzsaw on a table just beside him.

"_You_," Ravage snarled.

"They don't know," Laserbeak said, landing beside Buzzsaw.

"That doesn't mean they aren't to blame. What did you two do, when you reported to the mech that hired you? Did you expose Soundwave?"

"No! No, we'd _never_," Mesothulas said, as convincingly as if _he'd_ been the one arguing in favor of Soundwave's sacred right to privacy. "We said you lot are a quartet of talented frauds."

"Aw, you flatter us," Buzzsaw said; but the joke came out nervous and halfhearted.

"Why?" Prowl asked. "What happened?"

"Soundwave's disappeared," Ravage said.

Mesothulas sucked in a breath between his mandibles; Prowl went stiff. "Elaborate."

"A couple of days after your visit, Soundwave said he heard a weird brain outside. Like—a black hole of a brain. A void. No thoughts." Ravage started pacing. "We looked outside and saw a—a weird purple bot, and Soundwave went out to see who he was. And he didn't come back. We've searched everywhere, but I can't smell any sign of him. He wasn't mugged, he wasn't killed—he was just taken. We've called the enforcers, but they did jack because we're three beasts looking for an empty, they've got no leads—"

"Wait, wait," Prowl said. "You said a weird purple bot. What does he look like? Empurata? Gun instead of a left arm?"

Ravage stopped pacing. "That's him. Do you know him? Can you find him?"

Prowl looked up at Mesothulas. Mesothulas shook his head, holding his hands up defensively. "It's not me; I didn't say a word to him, I swear. I _swear_ it. I haven't even _seen_ him."

"Can you find him?" Prowl pressed.

Mesothulas hesitated. "I checked all his usual haunts after Starscream—I thought perhaps I could bargain to get him back. But I haven't seen him anywhere. I could try again, ask for someone to call me if he turns up..."

"Who's Starscream?" Ravage asked. "Is he...?"

"Also missing," Prowl said. "Soundwave's not the only one your weird purple bot's taken. We've seen him before."

###

While Mesothulas told the beastformers what little they knew about the mech using a senator's name as his pseudonym, Prowl combed over the spot where Ravage said he saw Shockwave and several alleys surrounding it. He didn't find anything.

"Is there _anything_ else you can do?" Ravage begged. "You know Security Services, you live in Iacon, and you've both got tires. You have connections."

"I think I can still call on Jazz," Prowl said slowly. "Jazz is—I'm _sure_ Jazz will still be willing to listen to me. We can probably get away with telling him that there's a chance Shockwave _believes_ Soundwave is a psychic of some kind without confirming that he really is."

"That's probably as much as Jazz will believe," Mesothulas muttered.

"Tell him whatever you have to!" Buzzsaw said. "Yeah," Laserbeak added, "keeping Soundwave's secret won't matter if we never see him again."

"Jazz can make sure the case doesn't completely fall off the radar," Prowl said. "But without any forensic evidence and without any leads to Shockwave's location, I don't know if it will do much more good than that."

###

Because the beasts were nervous to walk into Security Services and Prowl and Jazz had agreed that the credibility of the case wouldn't be helped if the disgraced paranormal investigators showed their faces in connection with it, they finally got to go to that Stanizian restaurant Jazz and Prowl had hoped to visit together. It wasn't the happy catch up session either one of them had wanted.

(Ravage was sorely disappointed to learn the restaurant was not, as he'd thought he had heard, Stanixian cuisine. At least the birds discovered they had a taste for Stanizian.)

All six mechs crammed together around a table, the three beasts giving their statements on the disappearance, Prowl and Mesothulas reporting everything they knew about the unknown mech going by "Shockwave," and Jazz taking it all down and asking questions. It was nearly night and the restaurant staff was getting eager to close up by the time they finished and dispersed.

"Thank you," Prowl said, while the birds were trying to convince Ravage that all three of them could definitely ride on Mesothulas and it would be fun. "For taking this seriously. After our last—well."

"I'd take anything you bring me seriously," Jazz said.

"You weren't sold on Starscream."

"Hey, I'm sold on about ninety-five percent of Starscream—I even believe in wandering sparks."

“Do you?” Prowl hadn’t known that. He supposed it had never come up before.

“Sure.” Jazz smiled wanly. "I just don't think they do, you know, _that_."

"Yeah, well. I'm sure Starscream didn't either, until suddenly he _was_ doing it."

There were two squawks of delight and a terrified yowl as Mesothulas took off down the street. Prowl turned to watch. "We'd better get going before they come up with a way to cause an accident. Keep us updated?"

Jazz nodded. "And lemme know if you two find out anything more about Shockwave."

"Will do."

###

By the time they'd made their way out of Kaon and onto the long interstate highway to Iacon, it was well past midnight. Although the highway was almost empty except for some late night trucks, Mesothulas drove by Prowl's side, squeezed into the same lane as him, so close that from the distance in the dark they looked like a single vehicle with three headlights.

"It's late," Mesothulas said, as a familiar building on a nearly barren stretch of highway came up. "And you shouldn't be straining yourself. Do you want...?"

Prowl looked at the hotel. Intellectually, he could remember why it was special. Emotionally, it didn't _feel_ special. The warm glow around the place had been nearly excised from his memory of it.

They could make a new memory. "Sure."

Together, they turned off the highway, pulling up to the small hotel midway between Kaon and Iacon.


	9. Case 6, Part 1: Shockwave and the Possession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My friends... it is the beginning of the end.
> 
> Case 6 is our final case, and a three-parter! Hope you enjoy! Particularly the flashback at the start.

Tarantulas's secret warehouse lab, Prowl had found, had awful weather.

He'd already known that. One of the reasons the warehouse district had been abandoned, after all, was because of its storms.

But these storms truly were _awful_. When Prowl focused hard, he could treat the rain like several sheets of a single moving object to save himself from trying to calculate each raindrop’s trajectory one by one—saving him from one hell of a nasty meltdown—but he had no convenient mental tricks to block out the worst of the storms: the lightning.

The lightning flashed continuously, like a strobe light through the hole in the ceiling, and the air was alive with constant crackles and rumbles. The static in the air made Prowl's armor tingle and his doors itch. Fortunately, although he couldn't just process the lightning away, Prowl had a ready defense to keep the constant flashing from giving him a processor ache:

He turned off his optics and buried his face in the fluff on Tarantulas's chest.

The peals of thunder made the two of them start from time to time, but otherwise, they were both perfectly content to lay together in a dry spot under the shelter of the roof, wrap their arms around each other, and listen to the rumbling and the rain.

Prowl sighed as an internal timer hit zero. It was long after midnight; and yet, still felt too early to leave. He shifted in Tarantulas's arms and mumbled into his chest, "I've got to head back to Kaon soon."

Tarantulas made a disgruntled whining sound.

"I know." He turned his face, optics still off. "But I have to. If I don't head back now, it'll be in the morning, and then I'll have to come up with an excuse for being late to work."

"I'll miss you."

"I know,” Prowl said. “Same."

Tarantulas stubbornly snuggled Prowl harder, wrapping his long arms tighter around his back and nibbling at one tip of his chevron. Prowl grunted and reset his timer for another five minutes.

There was a minute of nothing but rain; but then Tarantulas said, carefully and uncertainly, "I feel like I ought to tell you... I'm—not very good at making connections like this, to people. You'll talk about your colleagues and friends from time to time, and, I don't; and it's because I've... I've never had anything in my life like that before. People who _matter_ to me. At all. Even when I was working in a lab, I didn't care about anyone else there. They were either distractions from my work or barriers to getting the things I needed; and when they weren't that, they didn't matter to me. No one has _ever_ mattered to me. I... simply don't care about people." He paused. "I suppose that's... probably a rather alarming thing for you to hear about the monster you're all alone with in a thunderstorm." He laughed weakly.

Prowl made a noncommittal noise. "It doesn't surprise me," he said. "I mean—you've never struck me as very interested in people as _people_, rather than as resources.”

Tarantulas hummed in response. "I think I must have been very lonely back then—very lonely my entire life—and I didn't recognize it until you revealed to me an alternative," he said. "I... miss you dearly, whenever you go back to Kaon."

Prowl clicked off his timer. "All right. You win." He curled a leg between Tarantulas's and got comfortable for the night.

###

Just before dawn, when the lightning had died down and the rain had reduced to a light drizzle, Prowl finally untangled himself from Tarantulas to get ready to go.

Tarantulas rolled over onto his stomach, legs stretching and twitching over his back. "Leaving?"

"Mhm."

"Mm." Tarantulas lay there a few seconds more. Then he jumped to his feet. "Oh! Oh oh oh—not yet, though. I want to show you something."

"But I have to drive..."

"I know, I know. This will only take a moment. It's a lot of fun. You'll hate it. I've got to show you. Come on." He transformed and skittered over to his soaked workshop, pulling open several drawers at a time and peering into them. Prowl wandered to the edge of the dry zone, watching. "Where did I... Ah! Here." He transformed back and carried a box up to Prowl. "It's a—you know what talking boards are, yes? Several people sit around a board with their hands on a lens that slides between letters, supposedly powered by ghosts?"

"Yeah," Prowl said, "they're bunk. It's a trick of psychology where several people accidentally cooperate to spell words that none of them take credit for."

"Precisely! Well, I've got one that takes the psychology out of it completely. Look look look."

It was a little box with a long spindly bulb sticking up on the side, and a compass-like rotating dial on top with letters around the edge. "Here's how it works," Tarantulas said. "The little bulb detects fluctuations in static, such as could be caused by an EM field—such as the fields given off by _hypothetical_ ghosts. The dial will turn freely until the static gets too high, and then it will stop and the bulb will light up, and the letter aimed at it is the one the ghost means to highlight."

"Well, that's a lot of scrap."

"Shh shhh sh." Tarantulas was giggling through his shushing. "I knew you'd hate it."

Prowl examined the box skeptically. "It appears to be stuck on H."

"Well, of course it is, do you see the weather this morning?" He gestured up at the sky, "All rain and humidity and lightning. The bulb is _way_ over its threshold for static. It's not going to work in this weather."

He held the box out to Prowl, waiting for him to take it. "I want you to take it home with you and try it out. Unlike other rubbish 'talking boards,' I think there's something to the method of this one. _If_ there are ghosts, and if ghosts can affect _anything_, it would _have_ to be ambient electric fields—and I'd very much like to see whether this digital talking board can convince you."

"That's ridiculous," Prowl said, knowing that Tarantulas _had_ to know that and baffled that he was acting like he didn't. "This whole contraption is ridiculous. _Everything_ gives off EM fields, anything could interfere with this device—"

"That's why I want _you_ to try it," Tarantulas pressed. "Because I _know_ that you would be beyond rigorous in making sure there are no ambient EM fields that could interfere with the device." He pressed it into Prowl's chest. "Go on, take it home, try it out." He smiled.

Prowl frowned. "You're messing with me."

"Only a _tiny_ bit. I really do want to see what you think of it."

"Okay, okay, fine." Prowl took the box in both hands.

###

He got to work late, of course. Sentinel took one look at his face, told him to stop staying up so late doing extra work, and said nothing else about it. Prowl appreciated that Sentinel assumed he'd been working, but was slightly peeved that Sentinel was ready to accept it without seeing any work out of Prowl to prove it.

When he got home, he should have passed out immediately. Instead, he found himself looking at the talking board-turned-box. Well, if it meant so much to Tarantulas. Obviously, it _wasn't_ going to detect a ghost, but Prowl could at least see what it _did_ do and report the results back to Mesothulas. He could do it quickly and go to bed, and check in the morning to make sure he hadn't accidentally left something obvious like a lamp in the talking board's range.

His studio apartment was spartan enough that he had little trouble clearing a space for the box. He took everything off his side table and left the removed items on his slab, checked the drawer to make sure nothing was inside, set the table so it was equally far from the walls and his recharge slab, and pushed away his chairs and lamp and desk. After a moment of thought, he pushed the table a little closer to one wall to get it away from his bookcase full of datapads, and turned off the light directly above it just in case. Was that good enough? Was that as stray-EM-field-free as he could get it in his own home? He couldn’t sense anything nearby with his doors; but then again, they weren’t useful for detecting weak signals, and he didn’t know what this thing’s threshold was.

Well, it wouldn't hold up to rigorous peer review, but it was good enough for a favor to his partner when he was running on about three hours of sleep.

Before Prowl had gone home, Tarantulas had given him instructions on how to start it up. He turned the box on, stepped back to stand beside the bookcase so his own EM field wouldn't mess with it, and watched as the dial rotated a couple of times—"calibrating," Tarantulas had told Prowl—as it booted up.

Then the dial immediately started turning back and forth like a rotating combination lock, highlighting one letter after another with the bulb, quickly and uniformly. Prowl watched, dumbstruck, reading the letters as they stopped:

W... I... L... L... Y... O... U...

Words—those were two actual words. He scooted sideways around the room, trying to stay near the walls while also keeping an optic on the dial, to get to his desk and rummage blindly for a datapad he could type the letters into.

B... E... M... Y...

Prowl grabbed a datapad, turned it on, glanced down to see an unfinished report, and scrolled to the bottom of it—he could type the message and transfer it to a clean datapad later—

C... O... N... J...

The datapad slid out of Prowl's fingers and clattered to the ground.

U... N... X...

The message started over from the top.

Prowl sat on the floor.

###

"Come in." Sentinel looked up as Prowl stepped into his office. "Ah. Prowl. I didn't realize. That's not your usual knock."

Prowl paused halfway from the door, not sure what the appropriate response to that was. "I'm... sorry?"

"Don't be; it just sounds unlike you. Timid." Sentinel looked at his computer again. "What do you need?"

"I'd like to speak with you a moment. Sir."

"Yes, so I gathered from the fact that you're in here."

"Right," Prowl mumbled, looking at the floor. The door slid shut behind him. He took a deep vent in. "I would... like to test to reclassify. Into the intellectual class." He could feel Sentinel turn to face him. "Of—course, in order to do that, I... need a superior to recommend me for testing."

"You want to be alt-mode exempt?"

Prowl winced. Yes, that was what he was asking for. "I—would like to stress, that... I do not feel like I was assigned the _wrong_ function. My purpose is to protect the populace, and to solve mysteries—both of which I _can_ do as an enforcer, sir, and _have_ done—but, I think—that—there are multiple ways I can fulfill that function, not _all_ of which are—are contained within the career options presently offered for my alt-mode's assigned class. So..." Prowl heard Sentinel sigh and shift; he looked up to see that Sentinel had turned his chair away from Prowl, toward his filing cabinets. Was Sentinel just ignoring his request?

Prowl looked down again. "I've done my research, sir—the testing period is prolonged. I'll have to study for multiple exams, schedule and take several intelligence tests, write a thesis... I-I will, of course, remain working at Security Services full time through the whole testing process, this will be something I only do on my own time—"

"And when you get your exemption," Sentinel said, "what then? Will you be transferring to another duty in Security Services?"

Prowl fell silent.

"That's what I thought." Sentinel pulled out a drawer and started flipping through datapads.

"Sir..." Prowl didn't know what else to say.

"You came in with my recruitment initiative, didn't you, Prowl? Shortly after I was made the Prime. 'The best and brightest law enforcers from every state on Cybertron.' You were my sole Petrex hire, weren't you?"

Prowl thought the question was rhetorical, but just in case, he said, "Yessir." He hadn't had much competition.

"The first month you and your fellow new recruits were here, I made a list of the mechs I thought would stay in Security Services, and of the mechs that would go." He pulled out a datapad. "You were on the second list from the start." Prowl's fuel tank flopped.

Sentinel turned on the datapad, picked up a stylus, and scribbled at the bottom. "You, Prowl, truly are the best and brightest on Cybertron." Sentinel held out the datapad. "More than anyone else, you have been invaluable to my Security Services."

Prowl took the datapad. Under the Functionists' holographic, gold, winged cog symbol, surrounded by shimmering sunbeam-like flourishes, was glowing text:

"By the power lent to me by the Functionist Council, as the Bearer of the Matrix and Primus's Chosen Avatar, I hereby reclassify Prowl of Petrex. Formerly of the Law Enforcement Class, he shall now and forevermore be recognized as a member of the Intellectual Class, in pursuit of an ever closer realization of Primus's perfect plan for him. Thereupon, he is now Alt Mode Exempt and free to pursue a path of his own choosing."

Beneath it were the sign and seal of Ten-of-Twelve, and Sentinel's own signature and scribbled Matrix seal. Prowl gaped at the datapad.

"I always knew you were going to get bored of us eventually." Sentinel gave Prowl a tight smile. "I'm afraid you offered Security Services a lot more than Security Services offered you."

"How—how long—?"

"A few months ago. When I noticed your spark wasn't in your work anymore," Sentinel said. "I don't know what your plans are now, Prowl—but I wish you the best of luck with them. And, if you change your mind, you'll always have a place in Kaon."

Prowl nodded. He barely managed to whisper, "Thank you."

###

It had been two days now, and Mesothulas had spent most of them pacing back and forth in his office, waiting to hear something. Surely Prowl had turned on the talking board by now? Maybe he'd left it close to an EM field too strong for it to work properly? Maybe he'd seen the message, but didn't want—? _No._ Surely he did. Why _wouldn't_ he? Right?

Every time an engine that sounded even slightly like Prowl's went by outside, he froze, facing the door; and then went back to pacing, spark shrinking smaller.

But late in the evening on the second day, when he heard an engine pull up outside and slow, he knew.

He only allowed Prowl to knock once before flinging the door open. "Well?" he asked, bubbling over with glee. "Did it work? Contact any ghosts?"

"All right," Prowl said, expression completely neutral. "How did you get it to do that. I checked all over and didn't see any mechanism that can explain it."

"Say yes and maybe I'll tell you."

Prowl turned sideways so Mesothulas could see behind his doors. He had three moving bins strapped to his back, awkwardly arranged around his light bar. Mesothulas's spark almost burst out of his chest.

"Here's my act," Prowl said.

"You're—you're moving in?" Mesothulas said in disbelief.

"Can I?"

"Of course, of _course!_ I just thought—well, with your job in Kaon—"

"I quit."

"_What?!_"

"I thought I'd work here with..." Prowl shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry, is that too—? I've been thinking for ages now about what I'd do for the fourth act if you—and, well, I'm not for big sentimental gestures, but _you_ are, so that seemed like the kind of thing you'd... But that's really presumptuous, isn't it? To assume without asking that you'd want to hire me. I'm sor—"

Mesothulas slammed so hard into Prowl to hug him that it almost knocked him and his moving bins to the ground. Prowl hugged him back, sighing in relief. "... So? How does it work?"

"I said _maybe_ I'd tell you." He tittered, nuzzling against Prowl's helm. "But let me upgrade the EM sensors in your doors, and I bet you'll be able to figure it out for yourself."

Prowl considered it. "All right. Agreed. But show me where I can unpack my stuff first."

"You might want to leave them boxed for now. We should find somewhere bigger to live; there's hardly room enough for _me_ here..."

Mesothulas tugged Prowl in and shut the door behind them.

###

Case 6: Shockwave and the Possession

###

In the still predawn darkness, Prowl was sleeping, curled up on his side.

Until Mesothulas tackled him from behind. Prowl spasmed with a gasp, then groaned. "What? What..."

"It worked," Mesothulas hissed gleefully, sliding between Prowl's doors and wrapping his arms around his waist.

Prowl's optics turned off again. "Mmwhat did?"

"The elixir of life."

"You finished it?" He slid a hand over Mesothulas's. They'd finished the temporally sped up subspace pocket some weeks ago, and since then Mesothulas had been eagerly using it to develop an energon ore to Shockwave's specifications.

"I did. And it works precisely as Shockwave promised."

"Does it." Prowl wasn't awake enough to be either awed or skeptical at the claim that an unusual energon mix could raise the dead. "Where did you find something dead to resurrect?"

"Well—it was only a leg, technically."

"Mm."

"But I circulated the energon through it and it powered back up!"

"Wouldn't it do that with any energon?"

"Well. Yes. But would its paint color return?"

"Hmm." Prowl didn't actually know. "That's amazing. Tell me more in the morning."

Mesothulas chuckled. "Very well." Mesothulas shifted away for a moment, and the recharge slab's hum grew louder as he plugged in; but then he was wrapped around Prowl again. They drifted toward sleep together.

Somebody knocked.

They had to knock a couple more times before Prowl and Mesothulas were willing to believe that the visitor wouldn't conveniently vanish if they ignored them. Mesothulas whined as he was dragged out of recharge. "Who the hell—what time is it."

"It's sleep time," Prowl groaned. "What do they want?"

"They're after my elixir of life."

"Mmno." Prowl shifted, slightly more awake than Mesothulas. "If it's a walk-in client who wants help because he's being haunted to death _right now_, tell him we don't take those cases anymore."

"Me? Why me."

"You've gotta."

Mesothulas oozed off the recharge slab, dripped down the ladder, and lurched across the floor.

Mesothulas opened the door.

"Good morning!" Senator Shockwave, freshly painted pink and silver, beamed cheerily at him. "It _is_ technically morning."

Mesothulas closed the door.

Prowl opened the door. "I'm so sorry about that, sir. Yes? How can we help you?"

"Yes, hello, can I come in? I've got an important matter to discuss, and it would be best discussed behind closed doors."

"Of course." Prowl stepped aside, and Shockwave came in. Mesothulas had plopped into a chair at one of his downstairs work tables because it was closer than the recharge slab; he started when Shockwave sat across from him. They only had two chairs at the table, so Prowl stood awkwardly beside Mesothulas.

"Great." Shockwave beamed at them. "First, I'd like to congratulate you two on passing Ratbat's test."

Mesothulas blinked in confusion. Prowl said, "Sorry—'test'?"

"Yes. Soundwave is Ratbat's employee, you see. He has been for cycles.” (And _now_ Mesothulas was wide awake.) "Ratbat knows full well that Soundwave is telepathic."

"Wh—" Grappling for words, Mesothulas looked up at Prowl, who was no help at all, and then back at Shockwave. "Then—?"

"We didn't send you to test Soundwave's clairvoyance," Shockwave said. "We sent you to test whether you could accurately identify that Soundwave was neither clairvoyant nor a fraud, and _then_ whether you could be trusted not to reveal the information to the media or one of your scientific journals." Shockwave leaned forward, hands laced on the table, almost conspiratorial but for how prim he looked doing it. "We _didn't_ count on your correctly identifying him as a telepath—and then covering it up to Ratbat. He thought the fact that you were willing to lie to a senator should have been an automatic fail—as well as potential grounds for arrest. However, I argued that someone capable of keeping fantastic affairs secret even at risk of gaining the wrath of a senator and losing future lucrative government jobs proved you were _exactly_ as good at keeping sensitive secrets as we need."

"But wait," Mesothulas protested, "Ravage _begged_ us not to tell anyone about Soundwave. Was he in on it? Was that part of the test, too?"

"Ah—no," Shockwave said. "I've been given to understand that Ratbat has instructed Soundwave to keep his government work secret from his friends. They likely have no idea about Ratbat.”

Prowl thought about how Ravage had insisted that Soundwave would be helpless out in the wider world without them; and how Soundwave had told Prowl and Mesothulas to do what they thought was necessary to help their business. Hm. Not quite as helpless as Ravage had thought, apparently.

Prowl glanced at Mesothulas, only to find he was being glowered at; probably, he suspected, for arguing so passionately against telling Ratbat about Soundwave just for it to turn out he already knew. Prowl ignored the glower and asked Shockwave, "Was the Senate involved in his disappearance, too? Was that, what—Ratbat shuffling him around to a new job post?"

Shockwave glanced between them, frowning. "Soundwave's disappeared? When? I hadn't heard. Is he alright?"

Dryly, Mesothulas said, "Well, he's _disappeared_, so."

"Ah. Right." Shockwave's frown deepened, and he glanced away from them for a moment, mulling that over. "No, I... I have no idea. I'll have to ask Ratbat. Hopefully, he just relocated him. Oh, but—that's not what I'm here for. The Senate—the _entire_ Senate—wants to hire you two for a job. It's about Sentinel Prime." Prowl stood a little straighter at the name, as though Sentinel himself were there to check his posture.

It was, most likely, another job like the Mortilus cult—wasn't it? They'd worked with Sentinel on that. Although, the predawn appearance instead of a comm, an actual Senator for a messenger... something about this seemed...

Well, never mind. Of course the Senate would be clandestine about hiring paranormal investigators. And even if it seemed strange, how could they refuse?

"We would be honored to assist," Mesothulas said, which was, at least, probably true of Prowl.

"Great." Shockwave stood. "Then let's go."

"Wait, what," Prowl said, "right _now?_" Mesothulas got to his feet so fast he almost knocked his chair over.

"... Yes?" Shockwave nodded. "Of course right now. Does the entire Senate plus the Matrix-Bearer have to schedule an appointment? Is now a bad time for you to aid Prime and Planet?"

They glanced at each other. It was, actually, a bad time, due to the fact that this coming evening Mesothulas was scheduled to be a fuzzy eight-legged beast and couldn't reschedule without moving a significant distance outside of the orbit of Luna Two. But they could hardly say that, could they? "Of—course it's not a bad time, sir," Prowl said, and hoped Mesothulas would supply the rest.

"We just—well—expected you'd want us… later in the morning," Mesothulas said. "We'll just get our equipment and—"

"We can provide whatever you need."

Mesothulas hesitated before nodding. "Then, by all means. Let's proceed."

As they followed Shockwave down the hallway—apparently he meant to take the fire exit on the outside of the building rather than the main staircase—Mesothulas leaned over to Prowl and whispered, "What do we do if it runs long?"

"We'll make up some excuse," Prowl whispered back. "Too exhausted to keep working from getting up so early, maybe?"

"Senators won't like that." Mesothulas sighed silently, air rushing from his vents. "Hopefully, this will be fast."

They weren't surprised to find that a large mech with a discreet paint job was waiting in vehicle mode in the alley below, his back hatch opened away from the main street to allow passengers to enter. It just confirmed that the Senate was trying to keep whatever this was very hushed. Or at least hushed enough that they didn't want to be seen inviting paranormal investigators over. A member of the Triorian Guard—the multi-terrain triplechangers who guarded the Senate and important religious and political sites—crouched near the back of their transport. He wore a mask and armor that concealed most of his identifiable features and kibble, but couldn't hide the treads on his legs or wings on his arms. _Strangely_, despite his position as a guard, neither Prowl nor Mesothulas felt notably safer in his presence. Perhaps due to the fact that he had a gun as long as either of them was tall.

Prowl gave him a polite nod anyway, as he always did to those working security. He didn’t nod back.

Shockwave ushured the two of them in first, followed, and the vehicle sank a little lower as the massive Triorian guard climbed in behind them. The door shut behind him, and as they settled on the benches on either side of the vehicle and started moving, Shockwave explained the case.

"The issue, you see," he said, "is that Sentinel Prime is not possessed.”

Prowl slowly nodded. Tentatively, Mesothulas said, "In our line of work, that's usually considered the opposite of a problem."

Shockwave huffed. "Yes—understandable—except that Sentinel is the _Prime_. The Matrix is supposed to have possessed him by now, as it did Nominus. Should have _years_ ago, in fact. By now, he ought to be clearly channeling its will."

Prowl blinked. "Is that a thing it does?"

"Not widely advertised," Shockwave said. "Most citizens are more comfortable with the idea of their Prime wielding the Matrix than the Matrix wielding their Prime. They prefer for their leaders to have faces." He smiled wanly. "But it _is_ supposed to work that way, yes."

"Huh." Prowl was pretty sure that was how Jazz had thought it worked. He'd have to ask him sometime—if he could find a way to broach the topic without revealing any classified material from this case.

"He's getting..." Shockwave tilted his head back and forth, looking up and grimacing, "lllittle ideas from the Matrix. But, it hasn't properly asserted control yet."

"Like his little idea to pick up outward expansion where Nova Prime left off?" Prowl had thought that was particularly out of character for Sentinel.

"Yes, we believe that comes from the Matrix. I'm not an expert, but I'm given to understand that's the kind of idea the Matrix likes to bandy about whenever it gets a new host—a way of acclimating itself to a new era and political environment, testing the waters with its old ideas to see how they'll be received. Except it should have dropped that by now and moved on to new issues, ones more relevant to our era."

"Like?" Mesothulas prodded.

"Oh, I don't know—energon reserves? The role of Functionism in society? The legal rights of conjuges endurae?" Shockwave shrugged. "Things more relevant to modern Cybertronians. And in addition to its inability to pick up any new issues, it hasn't properly _overtaken_ Sentinel like it's supposed to, either. He's supposed to be—how was it with Nominus?—subsumed into it, from time to time, while it makes decisions on his behalf. Instead, he's been reporting hearing voices that aren't his trying to give commands, arguments in his head between two different entities—himself and the Matrix, I expect—vague, ominous urges that don't feel like they come from him..."

Mesothulas desperately wished he'd grabbed a datapad before leaving the apartment. "The Prime knows that the Matrix ought to be controlling him, correct?"

"Oh, of course," Shockwave nodded, "he had the whole thing explained to him when he received the Matrix."

"Then there's no chance he's, say, resisting the Matrix, is there?"

"I'm not sure whether he _could,_ if it was working properly. But, regardless, he's said that it doesn't feel... Matrix-like, I gather. He knows and accepts that the Matrix _should_ be possessing him, but he says he feels like it's trying to badly puppet him. He shouldn't be a puppet; he should be a vessel. Something's clearly wrong with the connection between them."

Prowl leaned forward, propping his chin in his hand, trying to imagine the mech he'd served under for so many years being a vessel for _anything_. Not only couldn't he picture it—he had a hard time believing that that was something Sentinel had been _waiting_ for all the time Prowl knew him.

Prowl wondered if the Matrix would improve Sentinel, morally. From what Prowl remembered about Nominus's politics (he'd had the luxury of not having to pay very much attention back then), probably not.

Mesothulas looked at Prowl, who was clearly in deep thought, and then turned back to Shockwave. "Just to manage your and the Senate's expectations," he said delicately, "I'm not sure how much Prowl and I can do in this situation. Our experience with possession typically comes from people who are terrified they're experiencing one and desperate for a cure."

Prowl mumbled, "And the cure is usually either therapy or moving the unusually large magnet they didn't realize was near the head of their recharge slab."

"But a problem with the _Matrix_..." Mesothulas turned to Prowl. "Did the Prime ever talk to you about it?"

Prowl shook his head. "He rarely mentioned it unless somebody else brought it up first. Sometimes, when he was leading a particularly dangerous operation, he'd leave me back at HQ with it, so it couldn't be stolen if the operation went badly. I can’t say the Matrix and I got to know each other very well.” Prowl frowned. "'Stolen'? 'Kidnapped'?" If the Matrix could possess people, was it a person?

"_Excuse me?!_" Shockwave barked. "He let you hold the _Matrix?!_"

Prowl rapped on his hood. "This is mostly hollow. I just have to press a few components around to make enough space for it. It's not very comfortable, though."

"You put _the Matrix_ in your _chest?!_"

Prowl stared at Shockwave. Was Shockwave indignant? Was that what Prowl was seeing? "Isn't that where it goes?"

"Good to know," Mesothulas hastily said. "Maybe repeatedly removing and replacing the Matrix damaged whatever components were supposed to allow the Prime to connect to it; a—a faulty latch in his chest, perhaps."

"Perhaps." Shockwave slowly sat back, frowning.

"If it's anything more esoteric than that, though..." Mesothulas shrugged helplessly. "Neither of us is a Matrix expert. I've read up on the Matrix—quite extensively, in fact—but what I've read has been what's available on the subject: myths, urban legends, et cetera. Unlike the other urban legends I've studied, I haven't exactly had an opportunity to _study_ the Matrix and sort out the truth from the rumor..."

"Well, now's your chance." Shockwave lowered his voice. "Truth be told—I suggested that we consult with an actual expert on the Matrix. Tyrest, for instance. Don't get me wrong, you two are outstanding in your field, but this isn't your field. But, well," he sighed, "others insisted otherwise, and there's an unofficial hierarchy in the Senate. There are the ones who decide policy, and then there are the ones sent out at the crack of dawn to coax paranormal investigators into the back of a truck." He grimaced.

Prowl considered that. "When you ask the Senate to approve your budget, do they, by chance, only give you fifteen percent of what you asked for?"

"Oh, you _are_ Sentinel's protégé."

Prowl felt a weird mix of honor and horror.

"So!" Shockwave clasped his hands together. "I wish you both the best of luck, as well as the wisdom of Solomus and the knowledge of Epistemus. And if it doesn't work out, I'm _sure_ Sentinel probably won't hold it against you."

Mesothulas sighed. "Great."

They lapsed into silence. After a couple of minutes, Mesothulas nudged Prowl and quietly said, "You could say 'held for ransom.'"

"Hm?"

"Rather than 'stolen' or 'kidnapped.' Both objects and people can be held for ransom, can't they?"

Prowl adored Mesothulas.

###

Prowl would have expected them to head toward downtown Iacon, where all the government buildings were crowded together along roughly five blocks on a single street. Instead, both his internal GPS and his personal measures of the speed they were traveling and directions they were pointing told him they'd bypassed downtown Iacon some time ago and were heading out of the city, moving slowly through the few streets wide enough to accommodate such a large vehicle. By the time he felt the vehicle tip down and they began descending underground, it was nearly noon. They were in a semi-industrial neighborhood far outside of Iacon proper—farther than the abandoned warehouse district that held Mesothulas's secret lab, but near it. Prowl continuously recalculated how long it would take them to reach Mesothulas’s lab if they left late in the evening. The fact that they’d already lost the whole morning made him particularly nervous.

They weren't allowed out of the vehicle until they'd made several turns through underground hallways, at which point the vehicle left them behind to wait outside. And even then, Shockwave instructed them to stay close and not look around too much, just in case. The Triorian guard stuck so close to their backs that they kept speeding up for fear that he would step on their heels.

They took a couple of turns before Shockwave stopped in front of a double door, letting it slide open; and there was Sentinel Prime himself, sitting on a medical berth, speaking quietly with Senator Ratbat, and looking—in Mesothulas's very professional medically-trained opinion—woozy. 50% like he was not sure what planet he was on, much less which room he was in; and 50% like he thought everything around him was a massive waste of time preventing him from doing important work. (From what little time Mesothulas had spent around him, he was pretty sure the latter was Sentinel's default state of existence. When he wasn't saying something degrading about beastformers.)

The doors slid shut behind them, and then clicked with the sound of locks latching. The Triorian guard mechanically took up his position in front of it, feet spread and hands loosely clasped.

Prowl leaned over to Mesothulas, murmuring, "Check out his optics." Mesothulas nodded, "I see." His optics were periodically flickering, the same way they'd done a few times at the party whenever he'd lost and then picked up the thread of conversation again; but now the flicker held more significance than just a sign of momentary confusion. It looked identical to the "exhausted" optic flicker they'd seen Chromedome do repeatedly, and like a far less extreme version of the constant on-and-off Prowl had experienced after Chromedome's attack. Damage from fried fiber optic nerves—the kind caused by trying to do mnemosurgery while plugging in somewhere other than the brain module.

Could an improper connection with the Matrix cause the same kind of damage as a botched mnemosurgery? The Matrix was supposed to connect to the spark and, from the sound of it, interact with the brain, so they supposed it was possible. Mesothulas wished they'd had time to research this case properly before being dropped in with Sentinel and expected to fix everything. He'd rather have liked to rewatch some footage of Nominus's earliest appearances as Prime to see if he'd demonstrated an optic flicker too—but no, Sentinel had been Prime for _years_ now and this was the first time he'd demonstrated fiber optic nerve damage. Right? Mesothulas whispered, "Did they ever flicker like that when you worked for him?"

"Not that I ever saw." Well. Considering that Prowl and optic contact got on like scraplets and freezers, that didn't confirm much.

Ratbat glanced toward the door. "Ah. You're all here. Good. Thank you, Shockwave, for getting up so early; you can go back to sleep." He waved Shockwave away dismissively.

"Hang on," Shockwave said, walking up to Ratbat, "I've just learned something disturbing I must discuss with you." He tugged Ratbat into a corner.

Sentinel looked between Prowl and Mesothulas, seeming almost dazed for a moment before his optics flickered again and he focused. "Prowl?"

"Yes, sir." Prowl approached Sentinel's medical berth, Mesothulas close behind him. The room looked like something between a surgical suite and a lab: it was spacious, clean, well-lit, and well-equipped with medical tools; along with the medical berth, it had a couch and desk, although it wasn't clear if they were for the visiting patient's benefit or for the supposed surgeon's convenience; and a couple of folding tables had several pieces of lab equipment that had clearly been brought in here for the purpose, their cords snaking across the floor—including a prosthetic microscope that paled in comparison to what was available in Mesothulas's secret lab. The wall on the other side of the room had a door and a long line of "mirrors" that Prowl was willing to bet were actually one-way windows. Where _were_ they, with a luxury surgical suite like this? Mesothulas saw equipment in here that he was pretty sure even Ratchet hadn't gotten his ridiculously dextrous little hands on yet.

"_Prowl_," Sentinel said again, more firmly. "Hm. I want you to know that I still disapprove of your professional choices."

"Yes, sir."

Sentinel shifted uncomfortably on the berth. "However, I'm willing to reconsider my stance if you can actually help."

Mesothulas could see the corner of Prowl's mouth twitch in what was very nearly the beginning of a very faint smile, and fought the urge to roll his optics.

Prowl didn't miss Security Services. Not the jockish bravado and posturing of most of the other top officers; not the way that the enforcers from other programs that Sentinel had run before becoming Prime would come in muttering frustration over the ways that basic civil rights supposedly constrained their ability to do their jobs; and certainly not Sentinel Prime's casual cruelty and prejudiced disdain toward so many of his own citizens.

But Sentinel had been the first and only boss Prowl had who'd ever overtly respected him, rather than put up with him because of his skills. The only boss to go "Prowl, I like the work you do" without following it up with a "but..." And Prowl had the same gratitude toward Sentinel for showing him that there were people who appreciated his abilities without having to take them, seemingly, _in spite of_ who he was as a person, that he had toward Chromedome for showing him that there were indeed people in the world who could tolerate him.

In other words—in Mesothulas's opinion—totally disproportionate gratitude for what Prowl deserved as the _bare minimum_. At least Prowl had never dated Sentinel, which saved the little grain of respect he perpetually held for Sentinel from being as uncomfortable as it _could_ be; but at least _Chromedome_ wasn't two budget approvals away from establishing a full dictatorship and cutting the amount of classes any given alt could occupy in half.

But Mesothulas endured it as Prowl stiffly said, "Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. We'll do our best." Which was, for him, effusive. "Mesothulas will probably be taking the lead. He has extensive medical training."

"Oh?" Sentinel focused on Mesothulas for a moment, glancing him up and down—checking his anatomy, probably. "Was he in the medical class? I didn't know that."

"No sir, alt-mode exempt, intellectual class. He was a scientist."

Mesothulas cut in, "I went to medical school because I thought the knowledge would help me with my work. And it did!"

Sentinel shook his head. The action made him sway slightly, as though he was drunk. "A perfectly good med school education, wasted on somebody who isn't even putting it to use in the medical field," he muttered. "Alt-mode exemption is going to be the death of Cybertron."

Mesothuas grimaced, mandibles drawing back behind his mask. "Alt-mode exemption is what allows the two experts you see before you to _exist_." Prowl's hand fluttered up, as though he was debating gently tugging Mesothulas back, and then went back down.

"_Well_, then. I certainly hope it proves helpful now."

"What?!" In the corner, Ratbat jerked back from Shockwave, hand on his chest like he'd just been personally insulted. His head snapped around to Prowl and Mesothulas. "You!" He stormed up to them, demanding, "What do you _mean_ Soundwave is gone? Gone _where_? When?!"

"We don't know where, he _disappeared_," Mesothulas said. Why did nobody understand what "disappeared" meant today?

"Two days after we spoke to him—the day after we spoke to you," Prowl said.

"How do you know?"

"We tried to visit him later. Rampage and the—"

"Ravage," Mesothulas muttered.

"Ravage and the birds told us."

"What—_they're_ still around? Then why didn't they file a police report?!"

"They _did_," Mesothulas said, and Prowl added, "We helped them file a second one with Security Services."

"Then why didn't _I_ hear about it?" This question wasn't directed at Prowl and Mesothulas, but Sentinel.

Sentinel just looked back at Ratbat, faintly confused. "I don't know anything about it," he said. "You know I haven't been well lately—I haven't been on top of Security Services' operations."

Ratbat opened his mouth, like he wanted to argue with Sentinel; but then he sank down on the nearby couch. He looked shaken. "Tell me what you know," he said. "Do you have _any_ idea what happened to him?"

"Uhhh." Mesothulas looked at Prowl.

Tentatively, Prowl said, "We _do_ have a good idea who took Soundwave, but it... doesn't exactly... sound credible."

"Well? Who is it?"

"A tall purple mech with empurata and a gun for a left arm," Prowl mumbled.

Ratbat grimaced. "Ah. Yes. _That's_ familiar. The mysterious mech who kidnapped Ulchtar."

Mesothulas leaned forward. "You _knew_ Starscream was Ulchtar?!" Oh, if a _senator_ had been sitting on knowledge like that while their names had been getting dragged through the mud—!

"No, but I read your police report. And I had the unfortunate pleasure of knowing him well enough to know that faking his own death and pretending to be a ghost to cover up his survival is the exact sort of ridiculous stunt he'd pull." He crossed his arms. "So, is this mech _following_ you two now?"

"It'd be easier to find him if he was," Prowl muttered.

"Ravage, Laserbeak, and Buzzsaw provided the description," Mesothulas snapped. "We weren't even there."

"Well, fine. Know anything _else_ about this mysterious subject?"

Mesothulas hesitated, exchanging another glance with Prowl.

"_Well?_"

Mesothulas sighed. "He hasn't given his real name—because, obviously, _this_ can't be his real name, and we do _not_ assert that we think it is—" (Prowl nodded in approval) "—but he _identifies_ himself with the pseudonym 'Shockwave.'"

Mesothulas expected instant derision for what sounded like absurd sensationalism. Instead, Ratbat's back jolted up straight, fear flickering through his optics, and he shot a glance at the Senator Shockwave quietly watching the discussion.

Shockwave, looking with his fresh paint and baffled expression more like an overdecorated partygoer who'd accidentally stumbled into a serious Senate debate than like a senator himself, stared back at Ratbat in utter bewilderment. After a moment, he said, "I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?"

Ratbat's expression hardened. "I'll look into this." He pointed at Mesothulas and Prowl. "_You two_. Get to work examining Sentinel." He turned back to Shockwave and snapped, "_Monitor them_."

"Of course," Shockwave sighed.

Ratbat stood, spun away from them with such a flourish that the six rotors dangling from his back twirled out like a cape, and stalked toward the door. (Mesothulas watched the gesture greedily, trying to memorize the exact movement of Ratbat's rotors—oh, if he could replicate _that_ little bit of anatomy!) The Triorian guard pushed a button to unlock it, stepped aside, and resumed his post with the door locked once Ratbat had passed through.

Mesothulas elbowed Prowl, hissing, "Did you catch that? Ratbat's rotors?" If he'd seen it and could reconstruct a 3D model...

"What? No, I was looking at Sentinel. What was it?"

Mesothulas sighed. "Never mind."

Shockwave waved at them and gestured toward the door in the back. "If you two don't mind, I'll get out of your way. I'll be back here if you need me."

Prowl nodded. "Noted, sir."

Mesothulas approached Sentinel again. "Right, so. We've been told that you're supposed to be serving as... the vessel of the Matrix?"

"The vessel of Solomus, technically," Sentinel said. "The Matrix is just his conduit."

"Got it. Now, if a literal god trapped inside a crystal doesn't feel like occupying his offered vessel, then I'm afraid there's not a whole lot we can do about that. It’s a _little_ bit above our pay grade," Mesothulas said. "Therefore, the only angle we can really attack this from is the medical—see if there's a problem with the actual physical connection being made. For that, we'll need to examine both the Matrix and you, sir."

Prowl asked, “We’re not going to get arrested if we take out the Matrix, are we?”

"_I_ won't arrest you." Sentinel grumbled, "Now, the senators running about might have a fit over it—they're so _fussy_ about the Matrix, you know, like they think it's made out of foil and will crumple at the slightest touch."

Dryly, Prowl said, "I thought Senator Shockwave was going to bluescreen when I told him you gave the Matrix to me for safekeeping."

"_Hah_. Lucky it was _only_ Shockwave. Now, the _Senate_ might give you trouble if you take it out, but—" Sentinel's optics gave a particularly harsh flicker, and he grunted, wincing in pain, before going on: "but, as the patient _and_ the Matrix's bearer, you have my explicit permission to remove the Matrix and do whatever tests you need to on it—short of damaging it." He hesitated, and then added, "But... try to keep your medical exam around my chassis. Whatever isn't working, I _think_ I can feel that it's somewhere in there."

"Our preliminary hypothesis lines up with that," Prowl said. They hadn't discussed it, but Mesothulas supposed that was fair; if the Matrix had misconnected to Sentinel in the same manner as botched mnemosurgery, it was probably failing in some sort of connection to the spark casing and interfering with the wires between the spark and brain module.

"Ah? Good." Sentinel nodded. "I suppose you'll need me in medical stasis, then."

"Ideally." Mesothulas moved to the controls next to the medical berth. “While you’re under, would you like me to do something about your optic flicker?” Prowl shot him a look. They had to be out of here by night and he was trying to add more time to their stay?

“Right. That,” Sentinel said sourly. “I’ve been meaning to get that looked at. Can you fix it without getting into my head? I don’t want you inside my head.”

“Unfortunately, no,” Mesothulas said. “When we’ve seen this before, it’s been caused by faulty fiber optic nerves.”

“Then leave it be. I’ll deal with it later."

"Oh, very well," Mesothulas said, to his disappointment and Prowl's relief. "Ready to put you under, sir."

Once Sentinel had been put in medical stasis, Mesothulas carefully opened his chest while Prowl stood and watched from the other side of the berth. Look at that. The Matrix itself. Oh, Mesothulas had a _million_ questions about what this thing did—very few of which he'd get a chance to answer this morning, no doubt, but just the thought that he _could_—! He hadn't quite registered until now that he'd be getting a chance to handle the item that had amassed the most supernatural speculation in Cybertronian history.

Using the medical tools stashed near the medical berth, he carefully separated the Matrix from the unseen connectors beneath it and lifted it free of Sentinel's chest. It was lighter than he'd expected.

"Hm." He hefted it, searching his mind for any sort of sudden spiritual awakening. "Nothing happened. I must not be Prime material. Do you want to try again, see if you've become more worthy since the last time you got tested for Signs of Affinity?"

Prowl shook his head. "Nah, I'm good."

"Great. Then let's get to work."

###

Shockwave burst through the door. "What the hell are you two _doing?!_" He was more appalled than enraged. "This is—this is sacrilege!"

Prowl and Mesothulas looked up from the Matrix of Leadership, Tomb of Solomus of the Guiding Hand, Splinter of Primus Himself, holding a magnifying glass and tweezers.

"We're, uh..." Prowl looked at the Matrix and back at Shockwave. "We're doing our job?"

"You're supposed to be _fixing_ its connection to the Prime, not _ripping it out!_"

"Well, no, but..." Prowl looked at Mesothulas for help, then back at Shockwave again. "How are we going to examine the Matrix if it's stuck in Sentinel?"

Shockwave sped across the room to them. "It doesn't _need_ to be examined, it's _perfect!_ It's the _Matrix!_ Put it—put it back where it belongs, go on."

Prowl looked to Mesothulas for help again.

"Yes, yes, of course the Matrix is perfect," Mesothulas said. "But if the parts that aren’t functioning right in this whole system are the points where it connects to Sentinel's chest, how are we going to examine those points as long as the Matrix itself is still in his chest? The only two ways of getting at them are by removing the Matrix, or by rolling the Prime over, drilling all the way through his back, pushing aside everything from struts to spark casing to make a tunnel to the back of the Matrix, and examining the connection points from _that_ side—but it seems a lot easier and a lot less harmful to the Prime of Cybertron, Ruler of All, and Chosen Vessel of Solomus to, say, take the Matrix out for a few minutes instead."

Prowl thought Mesothulas was laying it on a little thick with the titles; but after a moment of hesitation, Shockwave sighed and said, "Fine. Just—just focus on Sentinel, not the Matrix. The Matrix is fine."

"Yes yes, of course," Mesothulas said. Prowl pointedly set down his magnifying glass and leaned back.

Shockwave nodded in approval, and then flashed a quick smile. It didn't strike Prowl as what others might call a sincere smile.

They waited until he'd returned to the room with the one-sided windows.

Prowl turned to Mesothulas, muttering, "Well, we've got to check _now_."

"Oh, absolutely. Either the senators are hiding something, or they're so zealously convinced that the Matrix is perfect that if it _is_ damaged, they'll refuse to do the examinations needed to find out. Either situation necessitates a closer look." All the same, Mesothulas moved back to Sentinel's chest, apparently examining him for now.

Prowl leaned against a table to watch him. "I don’t think it's zeal," he said quietly. “While I was in Security Services, Ratbat considered Sentinel his personal security contracting service for private parties. I doubt that would be the case if he held any particular reverence for the Matrix or its bearer, don't you?" Mesothulas grunted agreement. ”But I’m not so sure about Shockwave. He _seems_ sincere to me—"

"Me too."

"Mm. But he never struck me as much of a believer the first time I met him."

"How did you meet him, by the by?" Mesothulas carefully opened up a panel higher up on Sentinel's chest.

"Oh, well—you remember when Senator Sherma was found beaten half to death in Rodion?"

“You took me to the bar where he was found—although I don’t remember making much note of the news when it happened. It got buried fast, didn't it?"

"When Nominus died right after."

"_Yes,_ that's right—because everyone assumed the attacks on them were connected. Didn't you say once that you and Chromedome were assigned as Sherma's bodyguards for a bit? Was that then?"

"_Technically,_ we were assigned as crime scene investigators. He wasn't _dead,_ but he was damaged enough for a mechaforensics investigation to yield useful evidence. But then he said he felt like his life was in danger and demanded we stay near him, and _then_ insisted Senator _Momus_ was in danger and that we ought to guard him too..."

"And what, then Senator Shockwave?"

"Pff. No, then Orion Pax and Senator Shockwave showed up at Momus's place on some private off-the-books investigation, absolutely sure that Sherma's attack was some kind of inside job and that there was some vast conspiracy around Nominus's death."

Mesothulas snickered. "Really. Senator Shockwave doesn't seem the type."

"No, he doesn't now. He certainly used to be, though—and he didn't have a single reverent thing to say about Primes _or_ the Matrix."

"Hm. Any truth to the conspiracy, you think?" Mesothulas moved up, gently prying off Sentinel's neck plates.

“Absolutely not. They didn't even go anywhere with it—the fire at Jhiaxian happened about the same time, and by the time Shockwave was done dealing with repairs and reconstruction, I suppose he'd gotten bored of the theory and dropped it completely. All that conspiracy talk was enough to spook Sherma and Momus into quitting, though. I don't think I've quite forgiven them for that. Momus was one of the few down-to-earth Senators."

"How is he?"

Prowl and Mesothulas both started as the statuelike Triorian guard spoke for the first time. His voice was deep, slow, and strained, like he didn't speak very often and had to struggle to squeeze out each word. Prowl ran through the conversation, double-checking to see if he'd said anything that would get them in trouble if the guard repeated it. "Senator Momus?"

"He... got me started."

Sentinel, a veteran of the Triorian Guard himself, had once told Prowl that the force was "highly trained, hardly respected"—regarded as dumb shields by the senators that commanded them, up until the moment they thought the guards should have been smart enough to intuit some expectation they'd never been told. Momus, in contrast, had grimly mocked the gentrifiers of ex-disposable class neighborhoods with Chromedome and discussed the Ibex Cup with Prowl. If he treated a couple of cold constructed cops like that, he was probably a vent of fresh air to a triplechanger in the Guard. "The last I heard, he'd moved back to Luna Two. I don't know what he's doing now."

The guard hesitated, then nodded with a grunt. Not much of a talker. Maybe he'd been ordered not to.

"Prooowl? Could you take a look at this? I'd... rather like a second opinion."

Prowl glanced over at Mesothulas. Sentinel's neck and half of his helm had been opened, the components carefully laid out on a tray. “Sentinel told us to stay out of his head.”

“I know, I know—I was following an irregularity up from his spark casing—Just… just come look.”

Prowl moved up beside Mesothulas. "Most of my anatomical knowledge comes from armor and strut wounds and chassis damage. I probably won't be much help with anything in the head."

"I think you'll be adequate."

"Why—?" Prowl looked at the components exposed under the armor. "Oh."

"You see that?"

"Oh yeah."

"I'm not crazy."

"No, no, that's—that's really..." Prowl put a hand over his mouth thoughtfully. "Hm."

They both stared.

Mesothulas began closing up Sentinel's head. "The Matrix is supposed to interface directly with the spark, right?"

"Right."

"So the fact that it can interface with Sentinel at _all,_ even if it's not a complete connection…”

"Right, right. That's... that's weird. The Matrix shouldn’t be able to do that.” Prowl glanced at it.

"You've read my mind." Mesothulas brushed past Prowl to get to the table where they'd left the Matrix and turned on a computer. "I've got a theory. I'm going to have to examine the cords between the spark casing and Sentinel’s head; in the meantime, I need you to do a little work on the Matrix for me, all right?"

"What do I say if the senators come complain?"

"That this is necessary to double-check the compatibility between Sentinel and the Matrix."

"Is it true?"

"Ehhh." Mesothulas tilted his hand in a so-so gesture. "I'm going to get a database of photonic crystal structures open for you, and I need you to compare them to the Matrix's with the microscope until you find a match, alright? There's got to be a datapad around here somewhere you can take notes on." He left behind the computer and started searching the room for a stray datapad.

"How am I going to get the Matrix under the microscope? I can't exactly chisel off a piece of crystal to put on a slide."

"Get creative." Mesothulas pulled out a datapad. "Aha!" He started deleting its current contents, returned to the computer, and continued searching for that database of crystal structures.

Prowl looked at the Matrix and the microscope dubiously. "Huh." Creativity. His nemesis.

He'd only been working a couple of minutes before Shockwave opened the door again and warily asked, "What are you doing?"

"Double-checking the compatibility between Sentinel and the Matrix," Prowl said. "Just observing. The Matrix won't be manipulated or modified in any way."

“You’re _sure?_” Shockwave said. “Neither of you is a Matrix expert. You don’t know…”

“Not a Matrix expert, _but_ an expert on photonic crystals,” Mesothulas reassured Shockwave. “Prowl’s under my supervision, and I give you my word that he’s not doing anything that will bring the slightest harm to the Matrix.”

“A—? We pored over your educational and career records; nothing in it said that you’re an expert on photonic crystals.”

“Because I didn’t gain my expertise in school and I’ve never felt like publishing on the subject,” Mesothulas said. “I’m a self-taught scintillologist. My education started in medical school, of course, but the rest of my knowledge of sparks—_including_ the structure of photonic crystals—comes from my own research.”

“Huh.” Shockwave frowned. “We weren’t aware of that.”

“So.” Mesothulas gestured at Prowl. “Are we cleared to continue our examination?”

Shockwave considered the request, and then nodded and shut the door.

###

They worked quietly for a couple of hours, until Ratbat came back into the room, saw what Prowl was doing, and stormed at him, demanding that he explain his impudence. Shockwave emerged from the back room, asked Ratbat to let the nice paranormal investigators do the job they hired them to do, wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and, with some force, managed to get him through the back door, where Prowl and Mesothulas could hear their muffled argument for several more minutes.

It was another hour before Prowl informed Mesothulas that he'd found a match to the Matrix's crystal structure and presented his notes—to Mesothulas's absolute delight, although he didn't explain to Prowl why. He simply accepted Prowl's datapad of notes with effusive thanks and slid it away for the moment. He didn't want the senators listening in before they were done. If the senators found out even a _fraction_ of what Prowl and Mesothulas had already discovered, they'd call this case closed and shut down the rest of the investigation immediately. When there were so many more questions they'd yet to answer!

Mesothulas took over the Matrix for a while, studying the casing and handles around the Matrix's crystal first with a magnifying glass and then with Prowl’s interesting microscope setup. Once he was satisfied, he returned to Sentinel and informed Prowl that he was now his surgical assistant.

As the afternoon wore well into evening, Prowl began to get visibly nervous. He was undoubtedly concerned that Mesothulas might not finish in time for them to leave. "I'm not entirely sure what you're _doing_ at this point," Prowl murmured, "which is fine, I can wait, but—I'm not entirely sure how scanning Sentinel's open chest cavity with different-colored lights will reveal anything useful."

"Then I can't wait to explain it to you later," Mesothulas said, winking.

But despite Prowl's nervousness, just before sunset—still a fair amount of time before the Luna One energy transfer would begin—Mesothulas made a satisfied noise, turned to Prowl, and said, "All right. I think I've sorted out how all this works." He began putting Sentinel's chest back together.

Prowl, master of jigsaw puzzles but a mess with any tools that required fine motor coordination, passed Mesothulas the removed armor pieces in the order he needed them without Mesothulas having to ask. "Were you supposed to sort out 'how it works'? I thought we weren't supposed to go farther than 'why it _doesn't_ work.'"

"They didn't _specifically_ say that," Mesothulas muttered. "Anyway, figuring out why the parts of it that _are_ functioning do so made it easier to figure out the precise nature of what's not working."

"Sure," Prowl said, obviously not entirely convinced that Mesothulas didn't just keep examining to satisfy his own curiosity. The mischievous smile he gave Prowl probably did nothing to dispel those suspicions.

Mesothulas roused Sentinel from medical stasis, and they waited a few minutes for him to fully wake and sit up. "Well?" Sentinel asked, glancing between Prowl and Mesothulas. "Did you find the problem?"

Mesothulas said, "A couple of them, actually. We'll discuss them with you and the senators at the same time."

Sentinel's gaze fixed on the Matrix, and he scooted toward the edge of the berth to stand and retrieve it. "Ah-ah," Mesothulas said, "I wouldn't put that back in just yet. We've discovered the problem but haven't yet effected a solution. Is your head clearer without it?"

Sentinel considered that—his optics flickered, but more lightly than they had been before—and then nodded. "I've only just woken up, but—I think so. Yes." He glanced at Prowl. "How bad is it?"

Prowl opened his mouth, shut it, and grimaced. "Well..."

"Mm. I see." He reached up to touch his throat. “You didn’t listen to my instructions, did you.” Ah, so this _wasn't_ coming as a surprise to him. Mesothulas had half wondered if he _knew_. Knowing he did, Mesothulas kind of hated him a little bit more.

“We were just examining the cords coming from your spark,” Prowl said, “and—well—that naturally led to…”

Mesothulas was mildly surprised, as he found he was from time to time, that Prowl had said “we.” Even after all these cycles, it seemed strange to him that Prowl was so eager to share the blame with him, even on things that Prowl had been opposed to.

“_Naturally_. I suppose, at least, this will make your report to the senators quick.” Sentinel stood, picked up the Matrix, and stared at it for a moment. And then turned toward the back of the room. "Well. Let's get this over with, shall we?"

The Triorian guard followed them through the back door and resumed his post inside it. The observation room was dim and unfinished, with some spare unfixed furniture stored away and a couple of unused computer monitors. Shockwave and Ratbat were lounging in chairs around a low table, splitting a bottle of something reddish that Mesothulas didn't recognize but was undoubtedly incredibly expensive, somehow the quintessential image of bored-to-death nobles despite their utilitarian surroundings. "Well?" Ratbat asked. "Have you worked out the problem, then?"

"Problems," Mesothulas said. Ratbat and Shockwave sipped at their drinks as he spoke, like he was some form of entertainment for them. "Two primary ones, interacting with each other to form the issues you've witnessed. The first and foremost being that Sentinel Prime is not, in fact, actually a person. He's a giant suit of armor being piloted by a tiny bot that transforms into a head."

Shockwave sprayed his drink across the table. Ratbat slammed his drink down. "Excuse me?!" He stared at Sentinel, optics wide. "Ex_cuse me?_"

Sentinel let out a long, resigned sigh. "We used to be a lot more common."

"_'We'?!_"

"Therefore," Mesothulas went on, trying to drag their attention back before they could start interrogating Sentinel, "the spark casing that the Matrix is plugging into only holds a _faux_ spark, able to radiate a spark-_like_ signature but not actually serving _as_ his spark. Which means it has a _completely_ different connection as it wires into his brain—not the right connection that the Matrix is looking for. Hence the optic flicker Sentinel's had lately—a common sign of botched spark-based mnemosurgery."

"Damn his optics," Ratbat snarled, snatching up his drink and throwing it to the floor. Prowl started. Ratbat pointed at Sentinel. "You're a fake! A—a false Prime! How dare you!" Mesothulas didn't find Ratbat's outrage a particularly convincing performance, but then he didn't find Ratbat a particularly convincing believer either.

"I am _no_ such thing," Sentinel thundered. "I've demonstrated all the Signs of Affinity—with _my own_ hands." He pointed at his head. "My body might be prosthetic, but my _spark_, my _true_ spark, shows that I am _worthy_ of the Primacy. I wouldn't have accepted the Matrix if I wasn't!"

"Pardon _me_ if I don't buy that! If you're willing to lie about your body for power, you'd lie about your spark, too!" While Ratbat was shouting, Shockwave slowly slouched back in his seat, elbow on an armrest and hand to temple, mouthing, _wow_.

"This _is_ my body! It belongs to me! I own it!"

"Oh? What's your alt-mode?"

"A train and a space sh—"

"Head! _Your alt-mode is a head!_ Oh, this is—this complicates _everything_, I can't believe—"

Mesothulas exchanged an exasperated look with Prowl, and then reset his vocalizer. "If I could finish—"

"Nobody c—" Ratbat grabbed for his drink, found he'd already thrown it, and snatched Shockwave's out of his hand to throw down instead. Shockwave stared in befuddlement at his now empty hand. "Nobody _cares_ about your tedious nerdy findings. We've _got_ the info we need, _thank_ you."

Patiently, Mesothulas said, "It gets worse."

Ratbat blinked at him. Then he sat back. Nervously, he said, “Fine. Go on.”

"Considering that the Matrix is _supposed_ to interface with a spark, the fact that it could connect to Sentinel at all is... inexplicable. Which leads into the _second_ issue we identified: the fact that it _is_ doing mnemosurgery. I located the needle holes in Sentinel's faux spark casing, and the needles in the Matrix’s casing. Now, for all I know about the Matrix, maybe that's normal—maybe the Matrix's ability to possess Primes has _always_ been based on mnemosurgery—but," Mesothulas pointed, "_this_ isn't the Matrix."

Sentinel muttered, "_What?_" Ratbat's jaw tightened. Shockwave's slouch dropped several inches lower in shock.

From the corner of his optic, Mesothulas saw Prowl put a hand on his chest. He didn’t think it was the gesture of a horrified believer so much as it was a far more personal fear. Mesothulas had struggled to beat back the same horror as he’d been conducting his examination. Prowl used to haul that thing around in his chest; if it had actually been against his spark casing…

"Prowl microscopically analyzed the crystal structure." Mesothulas held out the datapad, comparing the picture of the Matrix’s structure that Prowl had uploaded to the datapad to the structure he'd identified in the database as a match.

Voice slightly shaking, Shockwave asked, "How did you examine the Matrix with a compound light microscope?"

Prowl hesitated. "Don't worry about it."

Gesturing at the pictures, Mesothulas said, "This is the most sophisticated synthetic photonic crystal I've _ever_ seen—I mean, seriously, this thing is sublimely gorgeous, I'm honestly in awe of the craftsmanship—but it _is_ synthetic, and can only be made using synthesis procedures that were invented less than two million years ago. I'm honestly not surprised that no one else has noticed; sparks and photonic crystals are kind of one of my self-taught areas of expertise, anyone else who's examined the faux Matrix probably wouldn't—"

"All right," Ratbat said. "Thank you for that. You're under arrest."

"_What?!_"

Prowl didn't even speak. He lunged forward, trying to put himself between Mesothulas and the senators. One of the Triorian guard's hands seized his waist, jerking him back; the other seized Mesothulas.

"_Excuse_ me," Sentinel said hotly, "I understand that we need to cover up the _hell_ out of this information, and we're _all_ in agreement that the two of them will be having their relevant memories deleted once this is all resolved—"

Prowl raised a hand. "Sorry, we're all _what?_"

"—but that's only once this is _resolved_. I'd like to talk to the people who just _figured out that I've been subjected to mnemosurgery by unknown persons_ before we do anything drastic like that. Furthermore, I can _vouch_ for Prowl! _He's_ not going to do anything irresponsible with this information!" Mesothulas felt oddly offended by the exclusion.

Prowl's jaw dropped. "... I'm _trying_ to feel complimented but I can't get over the fact that you're all in agreement that you're going to _what?_" Mesothulas stuffed away his datapad so that he could use both hands to claw at the top finger wrapped around him.

Ratbat pointed at Sentinel. "_You_ can shut up," he said. "You're a head."

Sentinel raised a finger, paused, and dropped it. "Okay. Fair."

"I'm with Sentinel," Shockwave said, "head or not. These two aren't a threat to security—they've already proven willing to go above and beyond to keep sensitive information secret. Plus, in under a day, they not only figured out why Sentinel wasn't connecting with the Matrix, but also discovered that the Matrix _isn't_ the Matrix, and hasn't been for we-don't-know-how-long. They could be invaluable in the investigation into what _did_ happen to it!"

"Hmm, interesting point," Ratbat said. "You're under arrest, too. And Sentinel, for good measure."

"What?!" Sentinel barked.

Jumping to his feet, Shockwave echoed, "_What?_ Why— Oh.” His optics widened. “Ohhh, hell. You knew about the Matrix the whole time, didn't you?"

Ratbat smiled tightly. "Hm. _Get them_."

Shockwave darted to Sentinel's side. Sentinel immediately dropped to a fighting stance in front of him, like he was still a proper soldier of the Triorian Guard protecting his assigned senator.

Mesothulas gasped as his feet were jerked off the floor. He realized that the Triorian guard was lifting them in a demonstrative shrug, showing that his hands were already full.

"Oh, I don't c—figure something out!"

The guard glanced between Prowl and Mesothulas, shrugged, and chucked them both at Sentinel. All three of them collapsed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and shouts of confusion.

The next few seconds were anarchy. Mesothulas saw Prowl try to get up, just to get kicked back to the ground. Mesothulas reached for him—

His head whipped around as another foot slammed down on his other side. The guard lunged forward, both hands and a foot pinning Sentinel's body down on top of Shockwave. Sentinel's head detached, transformed, and slipped between the guard's legs. Mesothulas couldn't hear what Ratbat was shouting as the guard turned, without lifting his foot from Shockwave and the body, and snatched Sentinel into the air.

He dropped an elbow onto Mesothulas, a knee onto Prowl's back, and with his free hand reached behind himself. Mesothulas cringed, expecting him to draw a gun.

Instead, he drew two sets of stasis cuffs. He dropped one on Mesothulas's chest.

Mesothulas stared at them. No—just half an hour, if this had just happened half an hour later—

The weight of the elbow increased. Mesothulas shakily picked up the stasis cuffs and slid them on. They activated as soon as they'd latched shut, two streams of blue electricity arcing between the cuffs.

There was a burning jolt of electricity that shot up his arms and into his chest as the stasis cuffs formed a circuit with his spark. His arms went numb and limp, and he was filled from head to waist with staticky fuzz. Even his legs felt tingly and sluggish. He heard an awful buzz as his comm unit, plugged into his head, short circuited. He worried that the datapad slid under his chest armor, although it wasn't plugged in, might have been fried too.

Most importantly, he could feel the stasis cuffs electrically zipping shut his subspace pockets—thousands upon thousands of tiny sealed subspace pockets.

There would be no Tarantulas tonight.


	10. Case 6, Part 2: Shockwave and the Possession

Mesothulas could barely move. His feet threatened to scratch and scrape at the floor with every step. Beside and behind him, Prowl and Shockwave trudged along similarly, their arms hanging heavy and dead in front of them.

“I find myself left with a nagging question,” Ratbat said, light as a plastic bag, strolling ahead of his semi-paralyzed prisoners. “Sentinel, you’re about to forget again, so I suppose it’s fair to let you know that _you_ were the one who uncovered that the Matrix was a fake for us; and you were fine with that—until we started talking about refitting it into a remote control for the next Prime. At which point we had to take your memory of the whole affair before you did something stupid—and suddenly, _you_ were the perfect candidate for the primacy yourself. So, in light of that, what I wonder is whether you _really_ objected to the Prime being controlled by other parties, or if you just didn’t like that the Senate was starting to use _your_ tricks.”

“Your tricks,” Prowl echoed under his breath, like he’d dimly registered the words and was making note of them for later, but hadn’t quite deciphered their meaning.

Every time Mesothulas glanced at Prowl, his optics were wide and his gaze was roving wildly around the hall—no doubt, analyzing and memorizing everything he saw. He was so distracted he kept nearly walking into Mesothulas or Ratbat. Mesothulas couldn’t quite read the look on his face—was it terror? Wonder? The completely blank look of being shocked far past any emotion but the need to consume measurements? Whatever he was feeling—he was silent and useless.

Ratbat went on, “That’s not my main question, though. You see, we had to take you to a mnemosurgeon yourself to make sure you didn’t know about the Matrix. And, obviously, you _didn’t_ know about the Matrix until now—which _must_ mean that your mnemosurgeon knew how to needle you to hit your actual head. And yet, he didn’t tell _us_ about it. I wonder why. Old loyalties to _you_, perhaps—but he wasn’t too loyal to obey our orders. So, what happened? Why did he do our job but not tell us what you really are?” He glanced back at Sentinel. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?”

Mesothulas had an idea—a wild, unlikely idea, concerning a mnemosurgeon with a taste for the macabre who bragged that he was legally not allowed to name the five most important mechs whose secrets he knew.

But if Sentinel had any clue, he wasn’t sharing it. He was glowering at the ground—his much smaller optics flickered just like his larger ones had—with his arms crossed above the massive hand wrapped around his torso. He was just as useless as Prowl.

Mesothulas, on the other hand, was looking for any opportunity to fight. They passed a hallway with a couple of doctors hanging out near the next corner. Straining to move his uncooperative servos, he tried to lean down the hallway, shouting, “Listen to me, you need to get _help!_” They looked up at him. ”The Matrix is a fake and a mind-control device and Senator Ratbat's helping cover it up, this little bot is actually Sentinel, you've got to get help—" The Triorian guard tried to shove Mesothulas out of the doctors' view.

But Ratbat held up a hand, commanding the guard to halt. “Keep Shockwave quiet,” he muttered. The guard wrapped a heavy hand around Shockwave’s mouth, jerking him against his chest before the guards could take notice of the restrained senator. Ratbat seized Mesothulas's head and wrenched it around to face the doctors. Mesothulas could hear Prowl lunge for Ratbat—a heavy, slow motion—the first sign that he was really paying attention to the people around him. The guard slammed Prowl into the wall with the arm holding Sentinel. Mesothulas cringed.

"Look familiar?" Ratbat asked dryly.

The doctors stared at Mesothulas’s face for a moment, and then laughed. One shouted, "Hey, did Senator Ratbat kidnap Starscream, too?”

His spark burned. He almost tried pleading for help again—what did he have to lose that he wasn’t likely to lose in the next few minutes anyway?—but then he saw Prowl, cringing in pain, and his shoulders sagged in defeat.

Ratbat smirked, let go of Mesothulas, and gestured for the guard to keep walking. “You’re a pair of attention-seeking ghost hoaxers with a minibot and a senator _well-known_ for getting sucked into troublemakers’ conspiracy theories,” he muttered. “Nobody’s going to believe you over me.”

“Why wouldn’t they believe _me_?” Shockwave protested—but quietly. “I _know_ this place. This is my doctor’s office; I’m here for checkups all the time.”

Sentinel grumbled, “You idiot, this is the _Institute_.” His voice was an octave higher but otherwise still exactly the same.

Mesothulas waited for his spark to plummet, but it didn’t. On some level, he’d already figured out where they were.

Shockwave was silent a moment. Then he said, in quiet horror, “Why is my _doctor’s office_ in the Institute?”

“What’s going to happen to us?” Mesothulas demanded. He tried to keep his voice from shaking and didn’t quite succeed. “A-are you just—going to delete what we know and let us go, or…?” On some level, he felt he knew the answer to that, too.

Ratbat didn’t answer. Instead, he glanced at Sentinel. Reluctantly, Sentinel said, “If you two had less of a tendency to get into things you shouldn’t know about, maybe. However, with everything you’ve dug into lately, you’re probably going to be executed instead. Shockwave and I are too well-known to just be eliminated like that; we’ll get reprogramming and be returned to our duties.”

“You sound very confident about how things work here.” Prowl sounded far away. His gaze was still twisting back and forth between the doors they passed. “Why?”

Sentinel didn’t answer. Prowl didn’t press him on it. Mesothulas’s rage leaped higher on his behalf.

Ratbat stopped walking at a fork in the hallway, turned to face them, and said, “I’m afraid that at the moment, we only have one mnemosurgeon on site who can operate on a senator or the Prime, so you two are going to have to take turns. Let’s start with you, shall we?” He seized Shockwave’s jaw roughly. “I’m going to _make sure_ you’re dealt with properly this time.”

Weakly, Shockwave said, “‘This time’?”

Ratbat didn’t reply. He let go of Shockwave and looked up at the guard. “Lock them up, eliminate the ghost hunters, and then bring Shockwave to me.” The guard nodded and slowly trudged down a side hallway, while Ratbat continued on straight ahead.

Shockwave waited until Ratbat was well out of audial range before turning to Sentinel. “‘This time’?” he said again. “Was there a time before? I don’t remember that. I don’t _think_ I’ve changed.”

“You haven’t,” Sentinel said. “At least, not the way we meant you to. You’re less bright than you were, but that’s not what we wanted. It’s made the Senate very nervous, honestly. We’ve been trying to figure it out for cycles now.” Sentinel paused. “I’m only telling you this to say, whatever it is you did last time: try to do it again.”

Shockwave gave him a terrified look. “Well. I’ll _try_.”

Mesothulas glanced at Prowl to see if he’d registered that—if he did, he gave no indication—and then looked at Sentinel. “You didn’t happen to try to give him empurata at the same time, did you?” Sentinel didn’t answer again.

An internal sensor, glitching from the stasis cuffs but still barely operational, told Mesothulas that the energy transfer from Cybertron to Luna One was beginning. He should have been able to transform now, but with all of his subspace pockets locked shut… He strained to rip them open—even just one—and got nothing. If he could get these damn cuffs off…!

With great effort, he lifted his heavy knee to his chest, pressed his foot to the center of the cuffs, and pushed against the cuffs as hard as he could, trying to break a wrist, dislocate an arm, _something_. The guard kneed him in the back, his shin caught against the cuffs, and he couldn't move fast enough to save himself from tumbling to the ground.

“Mesothulas!” Prowl tried to kneel by him, but the guard shoved him aside and kicked Mesothulas, making him skid across the floor.

Mesothulas groaned, but jerked his leg free. “I’ll behave! I’ll behave.” He tried to stand before the guard caught up with him again, but couldn’t manage it without control of his arms and with only minimal control of his legs. The guard seized him up roughly—he squeaked in panic—but only to set him back on his feet.

He limped slightly as they continued down the hall.

###

Prowl had memorized everything. Not just the exact direction and distance they’d traveled, not just the exact dimensions of the hallway, but every door they passed—the signs on the doors, what he could see through them if they were open or had windows: still bodies, what looked like sparks stored in whiteout vacuums, rows of surgical tables with arm and leg clamps…

A side benefit: memorizing it helped him ignore his anger.

He memorized the place that the guard escorted them to, as well: a wing behind a heavy locked door, with long, narrow white cells with narrow recharge slabs and laser bars instead of doors. He jolted out of his rampant calculations to the realization they were almost at their stop; and that meant he and Mesothulas…

He turned to the Triorian guard. “You don’t want to be doing this,” he said quickly. “You’re a triplechanger—you could have chosen from _any_ of either one of your mode’s functions, including multiple modes that are specific only to triple changers—you even have a fast track to alt-mode exemption if you want it—but you chose to join the Triorian Guard. You wouldn’t have done that—Senator Momus wouldn’t have seen something in you—if there wasn’t a part of you that wanted to _protect_. You know that this isn’t protecting anyone.”

The guard looked down at Prowl, but kept walking, kept backing them down the hall. “Can’t stop,” he grunted, in that same thick, strained voice.

“Why not?!” Prowl demanded. “Hell, you swore to protect the Prime and Senate above all others! How can you justify handing Sentinel and Shockwave over to Ratbat? How does that add up? Why—why is this something that you can’t stop? Is this—is this how _all_ of you work?” He gestured around with a tilt of his head, taking in the Institute but _most particularly_ Sentinel. “By—what—eliminating people who ask questions just because they _might_ be threats—and leaving people like _Ratbat_ in place? How often do you do this—tell yourself that you’re sacrificing the safety of one now for the safety of a million later? How often has it _actually_ paid off? How often do you _know_, beyond a _shadow of a doubt_, that you _actually_ did anything more than just sacrifice one person after another after another?”

He could feel Mesothulas looking at him; he could almost hear him ask if that was directed at him. It wasn’t intentional—but Prowl still remembered Mesothulas’s bloody math, the math he’d almost talked Prowl into following with Soundwave; and he'd had time to think about it, over and over, since their argument, turning over the million things he could and should have said.

“Don’t bother,” Sentinel said. “Can’t you tell he’s being mind controlled?”

“_Excuse me?_”

“He’s hardly even talking,” Sentinel said. “He’s wearing the armor that we give—drones. So no one can see their blank faces. He’s probably programmed to only obey Ratbat.”

Prowl gaped. _That we give_, Sentinel said. Not even _they._ The wrath Prowl had choked down with measurements and memorization threatened to boil back up.

The guard suddenly stretched out an arm and swept Prowl and Mesothulas into one cell. They crashed into each other. Prowl stumbled and fell to the floor, but as soon as he’d reoriented himself, scrambled up and in front of Mesothulas to shield him. With what must have taken monumental effort, Mesothulas managed to raise his hands to Prowl's shoulder and pin them there with his body weight, not quite strong enough to grip. Mesothulas shouted at Sentinel, “If you _know_ so much about all this, can’t you _do_ something about it?”

The guard tossed Shockwave into the cell across from them, stood in front of it to block him from escaping, and, with his newly freed hand, took out his gun.

Sentinel squirmed in the guard’s grip. “I know a lot of mnemosurgeons’ preferred codes for—for triggers and killswitches and the like,” he shouted; “if I get the right one I might be able to deactivate his—“

“Hurry!” Prowl shouted. The guard’s gun was powering up. Prowl bent his head low and, focusing all of his attention on moving his numb arms, tried to cover his head and chest with his forearms.

Sentinel let out a stream of the most rapid-fire gibberish Prowl had ever heard: random words and sounds made so fast that Prowl could hardly identify any of the syllables besides the numbers. He heard something heavy drop.

He peeked between his arms.

The guard was sagging against the doorframe of Shockwave’s cell, gun dropped at his feet, hand held to his shaking head. “Free,” the guard mumbled, voice slurred, “‘M free.” Several stuttering, grinding sounds came from his body as various systems shut off and rebooted. Prowl sighed in relief, shaking arms dropping to hang loosely again. He felt Mesothulas slump more heavily against his back.

Then the guard spun around, flung Sentinel to the back of the cell beside Shockwave’s, and slammed the controls to activate the laser bars.

Mesothulas grabbed onto Prowl again, fingers straining to squeeze his door but only trembling. Prowl flinched. “What—?”

The guard reached up, slowly removed his helmet, and smiled cruelly at them.

Prowl gasped. “Overboard!”

“Overlord,” Mesothulas hissed.

“Thank you all very much,” Overlord said. As his ability to speak returned, no longer slurred or strained with the effort of squeezing through mind control, his voice was at last recognizable. “I’m going to enjoy this _even more_ now.”

“How—“ Prowl gaped at Overlord—and then looked at Sentinel weakly climbing back to his feet.

“Ah, yes.” Overlord looked at Sentinel, his mouth twisting into a grimace. “This is what our _dear_ Prime thought would be a _fitting punishment_ for my transgressions.”

“I swear,” Sentinel said to Prowl, “I didn’t know this mech was Overlord—“

Overlord pounded on his doorframe. “I was in the room when Ratbat requested me! _You handed me over to the mnemosurgeons personally!_”

Sentinel hesitated. “… Look, yes, that’s true, but I didn’t know our guard _today_ was you. You uh, look different in all that armor.”

“Strange, because I would know _you_ anywhere, even _without_ yours.” He turned his glower on Prowl and Mesothulas. “That goes for you two, too.”

Mesothulas was trembling so hard he was shaking Prowl’s door. “Please—“ Prowl said, “Don’t—“ He tried to think of some way to bargain for Mesothulas’s life that wouldn’t just inspire Overlord to kill Mesothulas first out of spite, struggling desperately to find a way to fit Overlord’s possible reactions into neat probability calculations.

“Oh, I won’t,” Overlord said. “Not _yet_, anyway.” He pounded the controls to their door as well, sealing them in. “I’d better get Shockwave back to Ratbat first. Can’t let him think anything’s gone wrong before I get my fingers around his spark casing, can we?” Overlord smirked. “But don’t think I’ve forgotten that you three are to blame for my being locked up. I’ll be back to play with _you_ later.”

He turned, seized Shockwave by an arm, and yanked him out of his cell. Shockwave cried out, and Overlord squeezed a hand over his mouth. “Shhh, don’t make a fuss,” he cooed in Shockwave’s audial. “I don’t have a grudge against you yet. Don’t give me a reason to change that, and maybe I’ll leave you maimed instead of murdered.” He hauled Shockwave down the hall; then he stopped, and he turned back. “You two,” he said. “Prowl of Praxus and my wayward cultist.”

_Petrex_, Prowl mouthed silently.

“If one of you kills the other in your cell before I get back, maybe I’ll spare the champion. Mortilus’s blessing, in exchange for entertaining me.” He laughed darkly and disappeared with Shockwave. The door slammed and locked behind him.

Prowl and Mesothulas looked at each other. Mesothulas's hands slid off Prowl's door.

“Well, _that’s_ not going to happen,” Prowl muttered.

“Is he crazy?” Mesothulas asked.

Sentinel piped up, “I’m confident you could take out Mesothulas.”

“_You!_” Prowl turned his furious gaze on Sentinel. “I spent _years_ watching your, your—your casual, passive dismissal of the civil rights of half of _your own citizens_. That was bad enough—but at least I could believe it was due to _apathy!_ But _this?_ This—this _active_ stripping of their own rights—to their _minds_? Their memories, their _autonomy_? This isn’t the—_all the years_ I served under you, and for all your flaws, I _never_ imagined—”

“_My_ flaws?” Sentinel said, in what wasn’t quite a bellow but clearly as close as he could get without his usual body mass. “And what of _yours_, Prowl? You had so much potential as an officer, Primus knows more than anyone else I’ve ever met—but you’ve _never_ accepted what was _truly_ necessary to maintain law and order on this world—“

“_You don’t get_ to talk about what’s ‘necessary,’” Prowl snapped, stamping a foot and almost losing his balance in the process. “You _suck_ at math compared to me. You don’t _want_ to look for options that don’t involve beating your own people into—”

“Gentlemechs, please.” Mesothulas’s hand brushed against Prowl’s, barely detectable only for how Prowl could feel it caused his arm to move. “As much as I would _love_ to listen until Prowl’s harangued the Prime into revising his entire moral code, perhaps we should effect our escape sooner rather than later?”

Sentinel paused. “Sorry, our what?”

“Right.” Prowl took a deep vent in and looked around the cell. “Is it late enough for you to…?”

“Yes—has been for some time.”

“Then we only need your cuffs off.” He tried to click his processor fans on only to find they were already at top speed. “I don’t suppose you have any sort of lock picks on you?”

“Of course,” Mesothulas said mildly. “In my subspace pockets.”

Prowl sighed, looked around again, and settled on the cell's laser bars. “Hm.” He looked up, checking the construction of the doorframe to see what kind of lasers they were dealing with. “Okay. These bars will just repel the stasis cuffs. But they _can_ cut through metal,” he said. “It won’t be clean or easy or fast, but, if we get your wrist up against the bars…”

“Ulgh.”

“I know,” Prowl said. “I’m sorry. But…”

“You’re right, you’re right. It’s the best way we’ve got.” Mesothulas sighed shakily, stood, tried to clench his hands into fists, and didn’t quite succeed. Arms shaking with the effort, he lifted his hands to line up one of the bars with a wrist. He stood there for a moment, tense, trying weakly to force himself to touch the bar; and then shook his head. “I can’t.”

“But—“

“You have to.”

Prowl’s spark stopped spinning. “Sorry?”

“Just make it fast.” Mesothulas squeezed his optics shut. “My arm’s already numb. It’s fine. Just go.”

Prowl looked down at Mesothulas’s hands with dread. And then, with a deep breath, he stepped forward, scooting the edges of his own cuffs under Mesothulas’s wrists to try to prop them in place. “I think I should turn my audials off.” He was distantly impressed by how even his voice sounded.

Mesothulas nodded.

“Kick me if you need to say something.”

“Okay.”

Prowl turned off his audials, mentally counted down from five, and slammed all his weight into Mesothulas’s arms. The laser made an ugly, molten gash in Mesothulas’s wrist, but didn’t slice through.

Mesothulas tensed, shuddering, but didn’t try to jerk free. If he had, Prowl didn’t think he would have been able to keep going. He turned off his optics, trusting his memorized position of the bar to keep his aim straight, and tried again, and again, not stopping even when he leaned too far and the laser bars left two parallel gashes on his bumper.

He’d barely cut halfway through Mesothulas’s wrist when he felt the EM field under his hands change as the bar severed the wires supplying power to Mesothulas’s hand—and with them, the conduit carrying the stasis cuffs’ circuit to the spark. Mesothulas vanished from Prowl’s hands, immediately twisting and reforming. Prowl’s optics and audials reactivated and he turned to watch as Mesothulas stretched and narrowed and distorted until Tarantulas stood in his place.

Tarantulas’s knees immediately gave out. He sank down, flinging his arms around Prowl for support, gasping out high-pitched near-sobs, and Prowl desperately wished he could hold him protectively. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I’m sorry. It’s okay. It’s over now. You’re all right. It’s over."

Tarantulas tried to say something, but choked back a sob instead. Prowl pressed his forehead to the side of Tarantulas’s face. They needed to move soon; but they could spare a few seconds for Tarantulas to calm down.

“Is that the fragging Spindleback?!”

Prowl cringed, shutting his optics. Ah. Right.

“Prowl!” Sentinel shouted. “_Prowl!_ Why are you being embraced by—_Did you elope with the Spindleback_. Is that what you—Prowl! Primus below. _Prowl_. Is that the _actual_ fragging Spindleback. The Spindleback was _that motorcycle_ you’ve been cavorting about with _this whole time?_”

Prowl groaned. “Yyyes sir. He is.”

“You _knew_ the Spindleback?! Is that why you insisted on taking the investigation? Oh, of _all_ the abuses of authority—“

Tarantulas’s trembling had lessened enough that he could stand on his own. He pulled back, wringing his hands together, clasping and unclasping the now-healed wrist that, in his other body, was nearly severed.

Prowl turned to Sentinel. “Technically, I didn’t know the Spindleback before the investigation.” He paused. “I didn’t _know_ I knew the Spindleback before the investigation.”

“I’m going to have your head for this!”

Tarantulas transformed, shrank enough to squeeze around the bars, skittered out around the doorframe, sized up, and transformed back. He tapped at the controls to deactivate Prowl’s bars. “With all due respect,” Prowl said testily, “the Spindleback and I are currently saving _your_ head—along with whatever else of you we can track down—so perhaps you might want to keep that in mind.”

"... Right."

Tarantulas muttered, “We should leave him."

“We’re not leaving him.” Prowl unlocked Sentinel’s door.

"You're _far_ too merciful." But Prowl was pretty sure Tarantulas said it affectionately. “Look, I’ve got a trick.” He pulled out a couple of thin wires, lifted Prowl’s hands, and pressed the wires into the blue electric beams between Prowl’s two cuffs. There was a sharp static shock in Prowl’s wrists, elbows, and spark; but then the cuffs went dark, and Prowl could feel his arms again. “Ta-da.”

“Thanks.” He tried to remove the cuffs, but found them still locked tight. “Can you get them off?”

“With that trick? No. They're technically still turned on; that only disables the worst of the stasis effects. We can look for something capable of cutting them as we go.”

Prowl nodded in agreement; better that they get moving.

Sentinel emerged from his cell, cast his flickering gaze up and down Tarantulas, and said, "You're _really_ the Spindleback. How did you hide all of..." he gestured at Tarantulas, "all of _this_ inside a _motorcycle?_"

"Don't worry about it." Tarantulas transformed, skittered to the end of the hall, and shrank so small Prowl couldn't see him as he climbed on the locked door. When he reappeared, it was in root-mode, opening the door from the other side. "Shall we?" he said cheerily.

Sentinel stared at the open door, shook his head, and said, "Right. It should be a straight shot from here to the exit, provided we don't run into any security. Prowl, have you ever trained your creature in building clearing, or are we going to have to give him a crash course?”

Tarantulas raised a hand. "Why can't I just shrink and climb on the walls?"

"Don't— Y— Hold on. What about Shockwave?"

Tarantulas transformed, shrank to half his usual legspan, and climbed the wall. "What _about_ him?"

Prowl followed Tarantulas into the hall. "If Overlord took him to Ratbat, then he's the other way."

"So?"

"So...!" As they reached the hallway intersection where Ratbat left them, Prowl gestured in the direction he’d gone.

"Must we?" Sentinel asked from somewhere behind Prowl. "He's troublesome. I don't think it'd hurt any to leave him here and see what they can do to straighten him out."

Prowl glared down at him. "One, the people who want to 'straighten him out' are also the people who are trying to mind-control the Prime, so ask yourself whether you really think you'd consider whatever they're going to do to him an improvement. Two, with both Ratbat and Overlord after you for entirely different reasons, do you _really_ think you can afford to toss aside allies right now?"

"Hrm."

"Excellent point about Overlord and Ratbat, Prowl—I, for one, would rather _not_ risk getting caught by them." Tarantulas crawled onto the ceiling and headed back the direction they'd come. "I might have eight guns, but I'm not actually any good at aiming them. We need to _run_."

"Sorry," Sentinel said, "you have eight _what?_"

"Don't worry about it," Prowl said. "Think of it this way, Tarantulas—if we _don't_ save him, then he's just going to get brainwashed and forget this whole incident, and eventually Ratbat and whoever else he's working with in the Senate are going to come after us—_all_ of us—to try to cover this up again. We'll have Sentinel on our side, sure—assuming he’s not still planning to _delete our memories_ of this incident—“

Prowl cast a sharp look at Sentinel. He shook his head—but it took a moment longer than Prowl would have liked.

“But, the Senate is automatically going to try to cast aspersions on Sentinel’s testimony now that they can prove he's not who he's always said he was. If we want a fighting chance of getting this story to light and toppling the senators who are going to try to silence us, we're going to need Shockwave _and_ Sentinel in one piece."

Tarantulas stopped. "Huh."

“Also, if _anybody's_ going to pay us for getting up in the middle of the night to risk our lives down here, it's Shockwave.”

Tarantulas laughed. "And here I thought you were going to say something about how it's your duty to help someone in trouble."

"That first and foremost," Prowl said, "but I know that's not going to persuade you."

"Prowl! When did you become so _scheming?_" Tarantulas turned around, moving back to stand over Prowl's head.

"About seventy-four seconds ago, when I realized you wouldn't agree otherwise. Shall we?" He gestured again in the direction Ratbat went.

Sentinel sighed. "If we're going to do this, we're at least going to need a _route_. Where's a...?" He looked around, found a monitor embedded in the wall, and stretched up to turn it on. Prowl watched as he quickly typed in a passcode and activated a hologram map of the complex. "The kind of surgery Shockwave's getting is usually done back here," Sentinel pointed at a wing several halls past their glowing you-are-here dot, "so our best bet is to head _this_ way," he traced a route with his finger, "and then, once we have him, retreat along these less used halls to loop back to my body—we can't leave without picking it up; the false Matrix is still with it and nobody will take me seriously if I'm not wearing that…”

Prowl felt his jaw clench tighter with each word. How well, exactly, did Sentinel know this facility? For how long? In what circumstances? Had he worked for it? _With_ it? _Run_ it? Under orders, or his own initiative? And how much, _how much_ went on here? _How much more_ than what Prowl was already used to—Primus, he’d let himself get _used to it_—did Sentinel do in this place—in places _like this_…?

Sentinel looked up at Prowl. "Got it?"

Prowl nodded sharply. "Let's go."

They'd only made it to the next corner before Sentinel said, "What is it?"

"Hm?"

"You want to say something. For the sake of all our safety, I think it's better if you get it out of your system now, rather than wait until we're under attack to blurt it out in some fit of emotion."

At the very least, Prowl had never found fault with Sentinel's pragmatism; but he didn't even know where to begin converting everything he was thinking into words.

So instead he settled for the only thing he _did_ know how to vocalize: "Sir, if I ever hear you call Tarantulas 'creature' or 'it' again, I'm going to wait until you're back on your body, and then I'm kicking your knee in."

Tarantulas laughed until he wheezed.

###

Clearing a building the proper way, when one of the two trained enforcers was about a fourth the size of a normal person and the other was still cuffed, was, as Tarantulas found out, a slow business, and not _nearly_ as effective at getting people out of the way as putting the two trained enforcers on the back of a giant hairy cryptid that skittered at people at top speed.

When Prowl and Sentinel had switched to riding on Tarantulas, Prowl had requested the datapad he’d been taking notes on earlier, and despite the stasis cuffs had been studiously writing away on it since he got settled on Tarantulas's back.

Tarantulas could feel Sentinel shifting on his abdomen, trying to lean around Prowl to see the datapad. "What in the world are you typing?"

"Every single thing I've seen here."

"Primus below. No, you cannot do that."

"Why? Why can't I?" (Tarantulas wondered if Sentinel was capable of recognizing the dangerous edge in Prowl's voice, and sort of hoped he wasn't.)

"Can you imagine the public panic that would result if knowledge of this place got out? Prowl, I understand your concerns. The fact that I work with the Institute, out of _necessity_ mind you, doesn't mean I don't know about the harm it does to the individuals brought here—but you can't just _tell_ the public about the ugly things done behind the scenes to preserve their safety; it leads to anarchy. If nothing else, your time in the Security Services should have taught you _that_ much—"

Prowl slammed the datapad down so hard Tarantulas saw stars. "I _left_ Security services," he shouted, "so that I would _never again_ have to stand by silently while I watch the public servants who are supposed to be _protecting_ the people _abuse_ them instead! And I'm _not_ about to stand by silently now! I am going to _be loud!_ FRAG you! Sir."

Sentinel was silent.

Prowl rubbed Tarantulas's head. "Sorry."

"It was worth it."

“You’re right,” Prowl said to Sentinel, “it’s better that I got that out now than in the middle of a battle. I’m glad I was able to put it into words.”

They'd crossed another hall—a passing worker who wouldn't have looked out of place in a mad scientist's lab spied them and fainted on the spot—before Sentinel said, "You don't even understand why all of this is necessary."

"You're right. I don't. Because you can’t ‘understand’ something that’s false. I think it _isn’t_ necessary. I think it’s expeditious in the short term at the expense of long-term stability and public welfare.”

Tarantulas, again, felt vaguely like he was being lectured for Soundwave—like Prowl was, even now, still retorting to his argument. How much time _had_ Prowl spent dwelling on this? He supposed he was grateful that Prowl hadn’t spilled out every single counter-argument he’d come up with on _him_.

Slightly more subdued now, Prowl went on, “That's one of the reasons I left—because if I stayed, I _would_ have ‘understood’ why this was 'necessary.' And I can't stand the idea of being that person."

"You're one of the only mechs I'd _trust_ to be that person without abusing his power,” Sentinel said. “You’d remain ethical in a place like this. Few would.”

"You're brainwashing citizens. You're _already_ abusing your power."

"It only qualifies as abuse if it's for a self-benefit!"

"Well, the _people_ certainly aren't benefiting, so who's left that _is?!_"

Tarantulas was starting to get why Prowl used to look up to this guy. They argued like each other: _ethics_ this, _the people_ that—even if they were arguing opposite sides. Cheerily, Tarantulas said, "On matters of morals, I've found that the harder you try to get Prowl to bend them, the more rigid they become."

Sentinel grumbled. "I've encountered the same problem. So how _do_ you get him to change his mind? Act like it doesn't matter?"

"Why should I want him to change his mind? I'm quite fond of the one he's got." Tarantulas almost passed a door, stopped, and backed up. "Ooh! Prowl!"

"What is it? Shockwave?" Tarantulas felt Prowl lean forward.

"Better! This room is full of _free brain modules!_" Rack after rack of them, as far as the optic could see.

"D—Tarantulas, no, don't take a brain module."

"Why not? No one's using them." He pressed up to the doorway and stretched a pedipalp for the nearest shelf.

"You've got no idea where they've been."

"In someone's head, presumably." His pedipalp wasn't long enough. He considered sizing up, figured that might wedge him in the doorway, and stretched a leg out instead. "I'm taking one. Do you have _any_ idea how hard these are to make without the right industrial equipment?" He picked up a couple, glancing at the bottoms, before he settled on one he wanted.

"Tarantulas, don't— The label on that one says 'abnormal.'"

"Nooo, the label says 'needs some extra TLC.' Isn't that right? You just need somebody to give you a little more love?" he cooed to the brain module, sweeping off the label and turning it over. "See, Prowl? It's got your OS. A clever little Talent Augmentation Routine brain.”

Prowl leaned forward to see. His bumper pressed just above Tarantulas's eight optics. "Really? That's all it takes to be 'abnormal'?"

"I'm sure there's more than _that_. But it'll be fine." Inscribed in a ring circling around the bottom of the brain module were the letters _OS – T.A.R. – OS – T.A.R. – OS_...

They continued down the hall.

###

They reached the surgical suite where Sentinel said Shockwave was supposed to be.

The door slid open.

The furniture was littered with pieces of people. Energon, oil, and grease smeared the walls and ceiling. Half a crushed brain module slid down the wall in a slime made from its own cranial fluid.

The door slid shut.

"Well," Prowl said calmly, "Shockwave's _probably_ dead."

"Ratbat's definitely dead," Tarantulas said.

"I wouldn't say 'definitely.' I only saw a couple pieces of him."

"And we'll find the rest if we look around long enough." Tarantulas paused. "Do you think there are any triplechanger t-cogs in there? I mean—the Triorian Guard's got bots here, right, and as long as I've already got a brain module—"

There were a series of distant, heavy thuds. They fell silent. Quietly, Tarantulas asked, "What was that?"

"It sounded like the doors sealing. The building must have gone into lockdown," Sentinel said, just as quietly.

"That's good, right?" Prowl asked. "It means somebody's noticed Overlord and contained him?"

The PA system crackled to life. "Hello, my friends." Overlord's eerily calm voice reverberated through the walls. "This facility is now on lockdown. Never fear—I've got the access code to let myself through the doors, and I'll be coming around to meet all of you personally. I had _such_ a lovely time when you stuck your fingers in my head that I thought I'd come stick mine through _each and every one of yours_."

"Oh yeah, Shockwave's definitely dead," Tarantulas mumbled.

"And if he's not," Sentinel said, "he's also not where he's supposed to be, which means he could be anywhere. We'd better escape while we can."

"Wait, no," Prowl said. "This place is on lockdown."

Tarantulas said, "That's fine, I'm sure I can still get through the doors. It'll be a little bit slower, but—"

"No, that means _everyone else_ is trapped. We've got to undo the lockdown."

Sentinel dropped his face into his hands, groaning. Tarantulas hissed, "Prowl, come _on!_"

"There are _people_ in here!"

"Horrible people who _brainwash_ bots!"

"_They're still people!_ At a minimum, we have to give them an opportunity to escape!"

With deep agony, Tarantulas moaned, "Why do you have to be such a decent person?"

Begrudgingly, Sentinel said, "It isn't far to the security booth. And if Overlord is going around crushing heads, he won't be standing guard there. That way." He pointed.

Tarantulas groaned, but started walking. "Fine! Fine. But if Overlord sees all the doors going up and charges back to the control room, I'm leaving you both behind."

"That's fine," Prowl said. “If you can only reasonably hope to save yourself, I’d far rather you do so than to attempt to save us and die too.”

Tarantulas sulked a moment. "I was hoping you'd feel a _little_ betrayed."

Prowl patted his head.

###

They avoided the doors with screaming behind them. It led to a route a bit more circuitous than Prowl would have hoped for, but even with the added precaution it was only a few minutes before they were opening the final sealed door between them and the security booth.

Two Triorian guards, decked out in the same feature-obscuring armor and masks as Overlord, stood guard. They jolted back, raising their guns at the sight of Tarantulas.

"Lower your damn weapons!" Sentinel leaned around Prowl to wave at them, and then hopped down and ran in front of Tarantulas. "I'm the Prime!"

The guards looked at each other, and then him. "Are you?" one asked.

"So we've got _you_ to thank for the codes that deactivated our mind control?"

Sentinel wilted. "... Ah."

They powered up their guns.

A horrifyingly powerful laser blasted through the first one's chest. While the other was turning to see where it had come from, a second blast took off his head. As they crumpled, a purple mech with an empurata face stepped out of the security booth. "You escaped. Unexpected, but convenient." His gaze fixed on Tarantulas. “Hm. I’d thought the camera was malfunctioning. Mesothulas, I presume?"

"_Tarantulas_, actually, in this form! You like?"

"Remarkable."

"_Really?!_"

"You two know this criminal?" Sentinel snapped. "Who is he?"

“I—That's Shockwave," Prowl said, struggling to figure out how to explain the situation when he did not, in fact, actually understand it yet. "I mean—not _Senator_ Shockwave. The other—"

"Sexy Shockwave," Tarantulas said. Prowl stared at him. "S—_Scientist_ Shockwave, I meant. It's a—it's a very similar—the 'sc' sound—"

"You're here to unlock the doors," Shockwave said. "I have been attempting to crack the system to do the same, but so far have only just gotten the cameras back on. Do any of you have security access.”

"I do," Sentinel said, but he didn't move until Shockwave stepped aside to give him access to the room.

"Hey, _jerk_." Prowl slid off Tarantulas's back to stand in front of Shockwave. "Why did you take Starscream's corpse? What did you do with it?"

"Yes! Of _all_ the betrayals! After I share that information with you as a _fellow scientist_, you steal our evidence and destroy our credibility in the process?" Tarantulas transformed. "And what of Soundwave, what did you do with _him_, hmm?"

"Yeah!"

Shockwave stared between them. There was a beep from inside the security room, and the doors slid open. "All right, let's get out of here," Shockwave said.

Tarantulas made an aggravated noise.

Prowl said, "No, hold on. We've got to get Shockwave." Shockwave tilted his head. "_Other_ Shockwave. Senator Shockwave. The Shockwave who's a senator. Where is he?"

Shockwave said, "Don't worry about it."

"But we can't leave without him."

Shockwave said, "He's fine."

"How do you know?" Tarantulas asked. "Are _you_ him?"

"Do I look like him?"

"That doesn't actually directly answer the question," Prowl said.

"Let's go," Shockwave said, "he's fine."

Prowl sighed and leaned into the security room. "Do you have the cameras up, sir? Can you see if Senator Shockwave is anywhere?"

"I don't see him," Sentinel said grimly, "but I _do_ see Overlord." He pointed at one of the screens. Overlord was stalking down the hall between the narrow cells that they'd escaped. He punched in a wall.

Tarantulas, who'd crouched down behind Prowl, leaned around him to see. "Oof."

"Right," Prowl said. “We should take another escape route. It might be too dangerous to try to get your body on the way out, sir..."

"It's fine," Sentinel said, "we'll reconnect later. Let's move out."

"No, wait wait," Tarantulas mumbled, "hold on a second."

Prowl turned to see what was delaying him. He was crouched over the body whose head Shockwave had removed. "What are you doing?"

“Shockwave’s kills were both Triorian Guard. Ask me what that means."

Prowl was afraid he knew what that meant—especially since he could _see_ Tarantulas sawing at the armor with a laser scalpel—but he asked anyway, "Okay, what does it m—"

"Triplechanger t-cogs!" He cackled in delight.

Prowl sighed, but stepped over the other fallen guard and moved to the doorway that the former guards had been watching to check the hall for anyone. "Just be fast."

From the corner of his optic, Prowl could see Sentinel carefully walk around Tarantulas's impromptu dissection, look up at Shockwave, and freeze when Shockwave looked back at him. For a moment, they stared at each other.

Finally, Shockwave said, "I bear no grudge."

"Oh," Sentinel said. "Great."

Tarantulas muttered, "Who has time for—_argh_." He wedged the clawed tips of his long hands in an armor gash, pulled it open, and ripped a chunk out of the fallen bot's side. "The t-cog's _somewhere_ in there," he said. "Okay. Ready. Let's go."

Sentinel made a disgusted noise, and Tarantulas protested, "He wasn't using it anymore!"

"Right. Ready?" Prowl raised both cuffed hands to point at a hall branching off the one they'd come from that went in almost the opposite direction. "I memorized the map; there's a route through here that steers around the edge of the building. I don't know _why_, but it's got almost no connections to the main body of the building—once we're in it, there's very few access points Overlord can go through to reach us."

"It doesn't have any connections because it’s part of the Institute's front business," Sentinel said. "But it will also leave us more exposed, both while we’re navigating it and once we’re outside. There's a more obscure route that Overlord won't know—most of the labs and surgical suites are connected by doors unmarked on the map; we can go through them and avoid the main halls for most of the way to the exit."

Prowl hesitated, and then nodded sharply. "Lead the way."

They navigated into the first room—a surgical suite that made Prowl's fuel lines knot because it had some diagrams that he recognized from Chromedome's office. Please, don't let _him_ be tangled in this. (_Would_ he be, if he had the chance? The Institute was the _one_ conspiracy theory Chromedome had believed in, and the one that Prowl had most strenuously insisted was absolute nonsense—to the extent that hearing it was _real_ had actually been momentarily infuriating. Prowl had to wonder now if Chromedome’s fascination had been that of a conspiracy theorist who wanted to blow the cover on a vast secret society, or one who wanted to join it? He sincerely hoped that they’d never have an opportunity to discuss the subject again.)

"How do you know this place so well?" Prowl asked Sentinel, so he only had to worry about being let down by one mech from his past at a time.

"I used to be the head of the Senate's security," Sentinel said gruffly. "I—hauled dissidents here. It was part of my job."

Prowl laughed humorlessly. "And you're surprised they were trying to mind control you with the Matrix?"

"Well, _yes!_ I'm the _Prime!_"

"A Prime promoted from security guard."

"I showed the Signs of Affinity!"

Prowl elected not to say anything else. He figured nothing he said could highlight the absurdity of Sentinel's thought processes as well as his own words did.

"... It's kind of obvious _now_, yes, but at the time they assured me that Solomus's wisdom would guide me toward being an effective Prime, and I sort of... took them at their word!" Sentinel threw up his hands and pushed through a door into another surgical suite. This one had a poster on the wall in Primal Vernacular that Prowl couldn't understand, but that made him feel uncomfortable anyway.

"Well, at least the system is _fair_." Prowl attempted a sneer. He wasn't quite sure he'd gotten the facial expression right, but it no doubt looked adequately negative. "If they're willing to treat even their devoted Prime with the same lack of regard they offer the average beastformer and ex-disposable. I can see why you think the system is worth going to such lengths to preserve." He paused uncertainly, and then glanced toward Tarantulas. "Was the uh, sarcasm...?"

"Dripping venomously, dear." Tarantulas was merrily rummaging through the surgical equipment in the rooms they passed through, apparently confident that Prowl wouldn't object to _this_ stealing because it was from the Institute. (He was right.)

"Good." Prowl didn't want to accidentally come across as sincere.

Sentinel grumbled, but didn't argue. "... In retrospect, this _also_ explains why I never got the funding I asked for."

From behind them, Shockwave piped up, dryly, "Fifteen percent of what you asked for. Right?"

Sentinel and Prowl both paused to glance back at him as he quoted Security Services' least favorite inside joke. "How do you know?" Sentinel asked.

Shockwave said, "Don't worry about it."

Tarantulas was quickly disassembling a large machine and sliding its component parts away into what Prowl _hoped_ was a sizable subspace pocket, but paused to look at Shockwave. "All this explains how _Sentinel_ knows this place so well. But how did _you_ get all the way back here?"

"My doctor works for the front business. I come here for medical checkups."

"Huh."

Prowl studied a few photographs they passed, and then looked down at his datapad and kept typing.

###

By Tarantulas's vague wasn't-paying-attention-to-where-they'd-been-going estimate, they were either more than, less than, or exactly halfway to the exit, when they had to leave the surgical suites and, for the moment, navigate quietly through the empty halls.

They'd only been out in the open hallways for a couple of minutes when they heard slow, heavy, thudding footsteps around the next corner. The group paused, then slowly backed up.

Prowl tugged Tarantulas back and stood in front of him.

"_Prowl,_" Tarantulas hissed, almost silently. "My turn, I'm in front."

"Not a chance," Prowl whispered. "I'm an enforcer."

"_Ex_. And I'm practically invincible in this frame."

"That's a lie." Prowl started backing up, arms still in front of Tarantulas.

"_Mild exaggeration._ Let me—"

They all froze as the footsteps turned the corner.

Sentinel Prime's undead headless body slowly trudged toward them, vivid orange faded to ash gray, the fake Matrix still dangling from one of its rigid hands. Tarantulas grabbed Prowl's shoulder, immediately decided that wasn't good enough, and reached back to grab Shockwave's as well.

"_There_ you are," Sentinel grumbled, somewhere between irritated and relieved. "It's high time." He jogged up to the body and transformed, and the body stiffly bent down to pick him up and pop him back into place.

Shockwave shook off Tarantulas's hand.

"Wh—th—y—" Tarantulas gestured at Sentinel. "_How?_"

Sentinel lifted a hand and forced his fingers to flex. "Don't worry about it."

"But—" Tarantulas ran out from behind Prowl, circling Sentinel, stopping behind him to observe as his armor, beginning with his upper back, started turning orange again. "But it's _dead!_ How—? I _must_ know!"

"Primus." Sentinel scoffed. "I'm not going to tell a pair of _paranormal investigators_."

"I both love and hate that answer." Tarantulas pressed his pedipalps together pleadingly. "Oh, just—just tell me what happens when you reconnect! Does your little spark power this great big thing? Are there backup power generators inside it that do most of the work?"

Sentinel turned to glower at Tarantulas—and looked past him, eyes widening and face twisting in shock.

Tarantulas turned to see Overlord rounding the corner.

Overlord smirked. He shot Tarantulas through the chest.

###

Prowl didn't cry out. He didn't call out Tarantulas's name. He didn't make any sound but a near-silent exhalation as his higher processor functions shut down and the only thing in the world that mattered was getting to Tarantulas's side. Shockwave and Sentinel both tried to hold him back; he flailed past them and fell to his knees beside Tarantulas, gaze focused on the wound.

Prowl knew very little about medicine. Almost all of his anatomical knowledge was geared toward autopsies, which meant all he could really determine by himself was what a fatal wound looked like. Tarantulas looked like about a dozen fatal wounds. The blast had passed messily through his chest and half of his head, and his entire left shoulder was missing.

"Prowl," he gasped. His remaining alt-mode legs curled around his torso, like he was trying to hold himself together. He reached up with his one functional arm, and Prowl seized it with both cuffed hands. Prowl tried hard to look at Tarantulas's remaining half visor instead of his exposed brain module. "Don't... Save yourss..."

Prowl stared at him. He didn't have the words to say that he couldn't possibly let go. He was paralyzed next to Tarantulas.

A heavy shape loomed in Prowl's peripheral vision. He looked up. The barrel of Overlord's gun was the size of Prowl's face.

And then it vanished. It took several seconds for Overlord's muffled words to work their way through Prowl's lagging linguistic programs so he could understand them: "I _could _shoot you both... but I think it's more fun to leave one to grieve. I'll even give you a chance to save him—if you succeed, it'll be all the more satisfying to shoot him again."

The words clicked into place and he struggled to lift Tarantulas without touching his wound. "Arm—get your arm over me." He turned to Sentinel and Shockwave. "Help!"

For a split second, they were frozen; and then Sentinel stepped aside as Shockwave rushed up. He lifted Tarantulas from the legs, and together they carried him behind Sentinel's walking wall of armor.

"Well! What a pleasure to meet you all here." Overlord's voice was hardly background noise. "When I saw your empty cells, I _knew_ you'd be coming for Sentinel's body sooner or later. Imagine my delight when I found that Sentinel's body was coming for _you,_ and all I had to do was follow it."

Prowl and Shockwave carefully set Tarantulas down, and Prowl moved to his undamaged side. "Open your subspace pockets," Prowl said. "You stole half the medical equipment in this building. We can fix you."

Tarantulas opened the pockets—Prowl could see the thin glowing lines—but rasped, "I—doubt it will do any good, Prowl—my injuries..."

"We have to try." Prowl began emptying Tarantulas's pockets, awkwardly trying to find angles he could use to get into the pockets despite the rigid cuffs around his wrists. He looked up at Shockwave. "Do you have any medical experience?"

"I disassemble bodies."

"Great. Help me do that in reverse."

"That is nonsensical." All the same, Shockwave knelt across from Prowl.

Overlord went on, "You've even managed to pick up another couple of friends. I remember _you_ from my cult, no-face. Who were you, another plant?"

"Just an observer," Shockwave said.

"And this odd little animal you picked up... Was he some freak the Institute has been experimenting on? I'm almost sorry I shot it first."

Prowl's jaw clenched.

"Prowl—" Tarantulas reached for his face. Prowl caught his hand and held it there. He didn't notice until then how much his own hands were shaking. "In my subspace—the elixir—"

"The— To what, bring back the dead?" Prowl grimaced. "I'd rather we not get to that point."

Tarantulas said, "I'm... afraid—we may not have a choice." Shockwave had picked up some of the tools Prowl had extracted and started trying to slow the energon leaks, but Tarantulas's armor was dulling and his one functional optic dimming.

Prowl held him tighter. "We have no guarantee it will work."

"Under the circumstances... I'd rather—test it out, anyway."

Prowl nodded and let go of Tarantulas so he could resume digging into Tarantulas's subspace pockets, looking for the elixir Tarantulas had finished that morning. What the hell _was_ this machine he kept extracting parts of? "Is it—raw ore, processed—?"

Tarantulas's hand slid down from Prowl’s face and hung over his shoulder. "Liquid. In a vial."

"Which pocket?"

"I-I don't remember."

Of course not. “I’ll find it,” Prowl promised.

"Prowl—M-my muse—" (Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry.) "If I... don't have a chance to say this again... I want you to know—you have been... the greatest light in my life."

Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry. Some distant part of Prowl that sounded more like someone else than like his own inner voice told him that if he didn't stop searching so that he could hold Tarantulas and look into his optic in this moment, he would regret it for the rest of his life. Prowl told that voice that he would regret it far more if he didn't spend every second looking for a way to save Tarantulas.

But talking cost nothing. Tarantulas deserved to get words back to match the ones he'd offered. Prowl didn't have those words, though. He was only the muse—not the poet. Instead, he said, "I love you, too."

From the edge of his vision, he could see Tarantulas smile—and then shudder one last time as his biolights went dark and his paint began to fade. Prowl froze, and then forced himself to keep searching. Don't cry, don't cry, don't—

"How _charming,_" Overlord drawled. Prowl didn't look toward him or Sentinel.

Shockwave paused his work. "He's gone. There's no point in..."

"Do you have anything _better to do?_"

Shockwave considered that, and got back to work sealing leaks.

"I have a proposal for you, Prime," Overlord said. "A bargain. One you'll find mutually beneficial."

Sentinel hesitated, but said, "State it."

"I can't say I enjoyed my recruitment, but I think I could get to like the Triorian Guard. Especially its opportunities for upward mobility," Overlord said. "I'll be your bodyguard—_and_ help you sweep this whole mess down the grate, like I already did with Ratbat. I wouldn't be the first killer you've made such bargains with, eh?"

Prowl was sure Sentinel would reject such an absurd offer—until the last sentence. Had he? Would he? It was seeming more and more plausible by the minute.

He didn't like how long it took Sentinel to answer.

"Name your terms," he snapped, and Prowl's spark shrank. He lifted Tarantulas's hips, slid a knee under his lower back to keep him up, and started searching his back subspace pockets. Tarantulas's fading EM field felt like Starscream's recharge room—like a murder scene.

"Only a couple of little things. First—a pardon, of course. My crimes were hardly leading news; it should be no trouble to strike them from the books." Overlord hesitated. "And, second—I want _those_ three."

Prowl fumbled and dropped a roll of medical zip ties. He shoved it toward Shockwave and kept working.

Shockwave stopped working, frozen, face turned up toward Overlord.

"The corpse of a wild animal, a bot whose very form defines his function as a criminal, and a cold-constructed army-builder with an acute case of—what was it you were caught calling it, Prime?—'terminal sentimentality'?" Overlord scoffed. "No one you can't live witho—"

A thunderous clang rang out behind Prowl. Overlord let out a quiet "_oof._"

Prowl glanced over his shoulder just long enough to see Sentinel drop into a fighting stance. Overlord grunted. "Really? For _those two?_"

"For a senator and the Prime's former second-in-command? Absolutely," Sentinel said. "Besides, nobody joins the Triorian Guard unless there's some small part of them that wants to protect. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to run that code."

Overlord laughed. "You know? I was hoping you'd reject my offer." Prowl looked away as Overlord launched himself at Sentinel. "Can't get in a cheap shot in train mode this time!"

Prowl was awkwardly stretching a hand into a pocket at the top of Tarantulas's thigh, which was slick with spilled fuel from being on the same side of his body as his chest wound, when his fingers caught around one of the vials Tarantulas constantly used. Prowl's spark leaped. He tried to press it down; this wasn't the first vial he'd found in Tarantulas's pockets. He pulled it free, saw it was full of what looked like energon, and his spark leaped again. He held it between the tips of his fingers so he could unscrew the cap, and was almost immediately hit with an overpowering stench. Prowl coughed, holding it out to Shockwave. "This is it."

Shockwave leaned toward it. "It looks like normal energon."

"It's not. I can smell it." Prowl hadn't been able to smell in almost half a million years. If the fumes off of this stuff could resurrect his deliberately-destroyed olfactory sensors, it could resurrect anything. "What do I do with it?"

"How should I know?" Shockwave asked.

"Because—because it's _yours._ It's your elixir of life."

"_What?_ But it's only been a few months since—How?"

"He'll be happy to tell you when he's not dead!" Primus below, Prowl could smell everything. He pulled back his hands and clapped his free hand over the lower half of his face. "_What do I do?_"

Shockwave stared at it. "T... Topical application is fine."

"Topical," Prowl repeated. "What, just—what, where?"

"On Tarantulas, obviously."

"_Anywhere?_"

"Yes."

Prowl muttered, "I do _not_ believe that," and leaned over Tarantulas's body to pour the vial over the edge of his spark casing and his open wounds, where it seemed likely to do the most good.

Tarantulas's wounds immediately lit up, and as Prowl watched, the metal shifted and stretched, spinning wires together, connecting open fuel lines, rebuilding broken struts. Prowl gasped. He'd be okay. It was okay. He was okay, he was okay—

"Impossible," Shockwave murmured. "He shouldn't have been able to produce this ore for five million years."

"Have you ever _met_ Tarantulas?" Prowl smiled shakily. "He makes the impossible obsolete."

Tarantulas shuddered, gasped, and seized Prowl's hands in both of his own. His optics flashed on, and his gaze darted around the hall in confusion before settling on Prowl's face. Voice staticky, he croaked, "Did it work?"

Prowl should have said something profound, something meaningful, something to properly welcome his conjunx back from the dead and into the warm embrace of the living. But he'd already thrown out an _I love you_, so all he said was, "Yes." Then, for something else to say, he added, "I can smell and it's awful."

"Well, excuse _me_."

"I didn't mean I smell _you_." Actually, Tarantulas probably _was_ among the things he smelled, wasn’t he? Prowl couldn’t tell. It was olfactory anarchy in here.

Tarantulas looked around, and his gaze pointed toward Sentinel and Overlord. "That—doesn't look good."

Prowl had completely forgotten they were fighting. He could smell their overexertion—exhaust and hot wires and heated paint and—he gagged, trying to wedge his nose into his own shoulder to block the smells. It didn't work. Overlord slammed Sentinel into a wall, one hand crushing his neck and the other squeezing his forehead. His body spasmed and twitched, not connecting properly with his head.

Prowl felt Tarantulas twist around under his hands, and then shrink. Prowl took the opportunity to clap a hand over his face again.

"I should have known better than to expect a _Prime_ to give me a real challenge," Overlord snarled. "So, should I crush your head now? Or keep you alive so you can watch me kill your little—"

He turned toward Shockwave and Prowl. "... What did you do with the body?"

Overlord stumbled under the sudden weight of Tarantulas mass shifting up on his back. With a sickening crunch, Tarantulas clamped his mouth shut on Overlord's head.

Overlord fell forward to the ground.

"Ugh." Tarantulas stood, transformed, and shook his hands to get off the bits of Overlord's head. His body hadn't repaired quite right; the missing half face and shoulder that had been replaced looked like Mesothulas rather than Tarantulas, and his upper two left alt-mode legs were absent. "Never doing _that_ again. Disgusting." He turned toward Prowl and laughed. "Was it that disgusting to watch, too? You used to work murder scenes, I'm surprised."

It took a moment for Prowl to realize Tarantulas was talking about the hand over his mouth. "It's not the gore. I can _smell_ everything."

"Poor thing." Tarantulas walked over Overlord—grinding a heel into the back of his head—and offered a hand to Prowl. "We'll fix that as soon as we're home."

Prowl took his hand, stood, grabbed Tarantulas's waist in his hands, and pressed his face into Tarantulas's chest. He could feel the line between soft fuzz and new chest armor, with a ridge of melted fiber optic cables tracing the boundary between the two.

Prowl turned off his optics so that they wouldn't start leaking. Tarantulas wrapped his arms around him.

He heard Sentinel shifting. "Prowl, we should..."

"Two minutes," Prowl said roughly. Sentinel was silent.

And in exactly one hundred and twenty seconds, Prowl took a deep vent, stepped back, and nodded. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, originally I was gonna end this chapter with Overlord shooting Tarantulas!
> 
> Shout out to those of y'all at TFCon, I was a fool and decided not to go this year. If you talk about my fic while you're there you're morally, ethically, and legally obligated to tell me about it.
> 
> Next chapter last chapter!!


	11. Case 6, Part 3: Shockwave and the Possession

Tarantulas had half a tire where two of his legs were supposed to be, and it was extremely disconcerting—especially in alt-mode. But as long as he was mass shifted down and riding on Prowl's shoulder, it was easy enough to ignore.

When Shockwave happened to pass near them, Tarantulas climbed out to the edge of Prowl's door. "Despite all the inconvenience you've inadvertently caused Prowl and myself, I should thank you," Tarantulas said. Shockwave turned to face him. "For saving my life, I mean."

"Ah." Shockwave faced forward again. "My repairs were unnecessary and ineffective."

"I meant with your elixir of life," Tarantulas said.

"Right. Yes, I would like to know how you accomplished that. None of mine is supposed to be ready for another four million years."

"'None _of mine_'?" Tarantulas repeated. "'Ready'? Wait, you mean some is in progress? Are you _making_ some? _Where?_"

"Don't worry about it."

They'd started up the ramp leading out of the Institute—they hadn't seen it from inside the vehicle escort that had brought them in, but it was undoubtedly the same way they'd come in to begin with. On Prowl's other side, Sentinel said, "The Institute's supposed to send a distress signal should it ever go on lockdown. That was nearly thirty minutes ago," (Tarantulas marveled that it was so _recent_), "which means this place _should_ be swarming with enforcers by now. The fact that it _isn't_ means that somebody on the outside must have known that two senators and I would be inside—they're probably trying to see if we're being kept hostage before they storm the complex."

"Wonderful," Prowl muttered. "More senators in on the conspiracy." His voice was slightly muffled; he'd been pressing one of his (still cuffed) hands over the lower half of his face to block the air passages to his olfactory sensors since they'd left Overlord's body behind. When Sentinel had asked about it, Prowl had claimed that he'd taken some accidental chemical damage while helping fix Tarantulas.

"Or maybe they were going to come in, but ran into the Triorian Guard?" Tarantulas suggested. On their way to the exit, they'd passed a few guards wearing the now obvious armor of the formerly mind-controlled. Most had been hostile.

"_Mm._ Also a possibility. In either case, if they haven't come in yet, then they'll be waiting just outside. But they don't know I'm a headmaster, and they don't know I know the Matrix is fake—so for now, the Senate and I are still on the same side." (Tarantulas made a mental note of the term. "Headmaster." Hm.) "I can make myself safer by returning to Security Services and staying too public to capture. However, I expect that to last a very short amount of time. If something happens to me..." Sentinel fell silent for a moment. "Do you still have that datapad, Prowl?"

"Yessir."

"Good. I expect you'll be compiling your report soon."

Prowl paused, looking at Sentinel. "... Yes, sir."

"Do you have somewhere safe you can hide until you're sure no one's coming after you?"

Prowl glanced at Tarantulas. Tarantulas raised a leg in a shrug; he didn't know where they were. Prowl said, "We're close to..." and didn't finish, which could only mean one place.

"Are we?" He'd gotten all turned around on the ride here. "Then, we can get somewhere, yes. If we're not stopped by the enforcers."

"I'll do what I can to help you get out." The rolling door at the end of the ramp was up ahead. "After that, stick low and—if I can't contact you—listen to the news. I've just got to make contact with Shockwave..."

Shockwave said, "Yes?"

Sentinel said, "_Senator_ Shockwave."

"Ah. Right." Shockwave slowed down. "I'll be going, then." He turned and headed back down the ramp.

Tarantulas turned around to watch him. "Where in the world do you think you're going?" And then Prowl turned around too, and Tarantulas had to turn again to keep facing Shockwave.

"Hold on!" Prowl said. "What about the people you kidnapped?!"

"Bye," Shockwave said.

"But...!" Prowl flung up his hands and looked at Sentinel.

Sentinel muttered, "_I'm_ not following him."

Prowl sighed, turned, and followed Sentinel.

(Tarantulas turned _again_ and surreptitiously watched Shockwave go.)

Near the door, Prowl slowed down. "Before we get outside," he said, "I want to know whether I should delete your frequency from my comm unit."

Sentinel turned and stared at Prowl. "I beg your pardon?"

Tarantulas lurched slightly as Prowl straightened his posture. "You are now aware that I am involved in the kind of relationship of which you strenuously disapprove, with a mech who's both a beastformer and a known criminal."

Tarantulas was hit with a bolt of confused alarm as he wondered who Prowl was suddenly confessing to being in a relationship with, before he remembered all the burglaries in the Spindleback's file. Ah, right, yes, _those_ crimes.

Stiffly, Prowl said, "I am not interested in spending all of our future interactions, or lack thereof, attempting to deduce your new opinion of me based on body language and veiled subtext. I don't keep the contact info of people I can't reasonably expect to comm and receive a predictable tangible benefit from. For your convenience _and_ mine, I want to settle where I stand with you now. Should I delete or keep your frequency?"

Tarantulas had seen gymnastics routines that went through fewer physical contortions than Sentinel's facial expression. But finally, he said, "Keep it."

Prowl nodded sharply.

Sentinel stepped on a pressure plate, and the door began rolling up. "Should I delete _yours?_"

Prowl frowned thoughtfully. "With the Matrix out of your chest, how do you currently feel about conquering other planets?"

"Terrible," Sentinel snapped. "I hate it. Everything about it. Waste of time, resources, and soldiers. There's enough of a world for Cybertronians on Cybertron, and _that's_ the only world I'm interested in."

Prowl considered that. "And you want me to write my report on this incident."

"I _expect_ you to," Sentinel said. "I... do not currently intend to stand in your way."

Prowl nodded. "I'll be taking your calls on a case-by-case basis."

Sentinel snorted.

The door was hardly halfway up when they were blasted with headlights. Tarantulas shrank and scuttled behind Prowl's head. He could hear a lot of motion that he _hoped_ wasn’t guns being raised. An amplified voice said, "Stop—law enforcement! Identify yourselves!"

Sentinel swore, stepping forward with a hand raised to block the light. "It's _me_, you idiot, don't you recognize your Prime?"

There was a slight pause. "We, uhhh—we were told you might be an imposter."

Sentinel spread his hands. "Do I _look_ like an imposter?!"

There was a longer pause. "Wouldn't an imposter look like the person he's posing as?"

Tarantulas choked back a laugh.

It was clear that a fight had recently taken place out here. Just from his limited vantage point behind Prowl's head, Tarantulas could see a couple of downed Triorian guards being tended to, as well as a few far lighter builds—doctors, maybe? Formerly mind-controlled and out for blood once they were liberated, or simply caught in the crossfire? Maybe the guards had brought hostages.

Either way, with several suddenly rebellious Triorian triplechangers lying injured or dead out here, it was no wonder they were a bit wary around their triplechanger ex-Triorian Prime.

"Of all the—" Sentinel stomped forward, barking, "Who put you up to this? The Senate? Bad enough they're always slowing down my work; now they're making me prove my own identity? Who gave you that rust wash about imposters—Proteus? Was it Proteus?"

"Uhhh—I-I didn't, get the uh, call, sir—"

"You can't _stutter_ into a _megaphone!_ Give me that damn—" Sentinel stomped out of Tarantulas’s field of view. There were several amplified scuffling sounds, and several much-less-amplified apologies from the prior holder of the megaphone.

"Go," Tarantulas hissed. "While they're distracted."

"I don't want to look suspicious."

"Then be _casual_ about it. Nobody ever suspects anything if you look casual. But _go_, there's an alley right over there."

Prowl lowered his hands from his face, immediately tensed up, and shuddered faintly. As Prowl performed a very stiff approximation of a stroll toward the alley, Sentinel's voice boomed over the megaphone, "_I'm_ taking charge of this operation. I want you ready to clear this building in three minutes. Get into position. I'm briefing you while you move. Based on what I know about how this building’s staffed, about thirty potential hostiles, six taken out—I see you got a couple more—but they may have recruited more on the inside from among prisoners. Anyone who _looks_ like Triorian Guard might be a hostile in disguise."

"In disguise," Tarantulas scoffed. "Like they aren't _actual_ guards who were conscripted against their will."

Prowl grunted. Now that they were out of sight of the enforcers, he covered his face again and picked up the pace, and Tarantulas moved to his shoulder to help scan the narrow path for any way they could get into Iacon's gutter system. "We've got _our_ story," Prowl said. "All we have to do is type it up and release it." He paused. "Anonymously, perhaps."

"Will it make a difference, if Sentinel knows who published it?"

"I think he supports our publishing it."

"That could be a ruse."

"He wouldn’t pretend to support our publishing it as a trap. He doesn't operate like..." Prowl trailed off. "I guess I don't know _what_ he operates like." Tarantulas patted his head sympathetically. Prowl said, "Even so, I'm still leaning toward anonymous publishing. I think I'd rather get secretly hauled away by Sentinel's cronies to be brainwashed in the middle of the night than have to deal with everyone I know thinking I'm an attention-seeking conspiracy theorist again."

"Hyeh! Well, then we'll leave _your_ name off it. When _I_ fall off the radar for a few days and suddenly reappear just to recant my story about the Institute and sing the Prime's praises, I _want_ people to be suspicious."

Prowl stopped in front of a maintenance hole cover. Tarantulas dropped down and sized up to pry it up, then sized down and climbed back onto Prowl. Prowl reached for the ladder, had to uncover his face, shuddered, covered it again, and with a grimace, forced himself to take the ladder. “I’m going to hate this.” His voice sounded pained.

“Should I carry you down instead—?”

“No—no, I don’t want to risk anyone turning a corner and spotting you.” Prowl squeezed his eyes shut—Tarantulas wondered if that helped—and descended into the hole.

He let out a swear Tarantulas was fairly sure he'd never heard Prowl use before and turned his face into his shoulder since his cuffed hands were occupied. "Do all sewers smell like this?"

"This one's comparatively mild, actually."

"I can't do this. My processor is going to glitch out before we get there." At the bottom of the ladder, he clapped his other hand over his face. "Ugh."

Tarantulas tried not to laugh at Prowl's screwed-up face. "Would you like me to unplug your olfactory sensors again before we go any further?”

Prowl considered the offer. “That would be nice. _Can_ you?”

“As long as you trust me to crawl inside your head without messing anything up.”

“Always.” He didn’t even pause to think about it.

Tarantulas tapped Prowl's chin. "Hold as still as you can." Then he shrank as small as he could and crept in.

###

"What was death like?" Prowl asked, as Tarantulas carefully sliced into his stasis cuffs.

"Haven't a clue," Tarantulas said. Which, he supposed, said something about the experience in and of itself—although not very much that was interesting to share.

Prowl was silent for a moment—although Tarantulas was sure the questions would come soon. For the moment, though, he enjoyed quietly fussing over Prowl’s hands, sitting on the floor together in the heart of his warehouse laboratory, the open sky above clear and starry.

"So, no—visions of Primus? Or voids of space with a distant spark floating, or... anything like that? Wisdom of the ages? Visits from Starscream?”

"Hyeh. No. Nothing of the sort. Just losing and then regaining consciousness." Tarantulas managed to get off a panel from the cuffs' casing and started delicately disabling the electronics. "I _did_ have a revelation. About the elixir of life and igniting a spark for my little project. But the revelation was undoubtedly from my own brain, not anything that was offered to me on the other side."

Prowl's optics brightened. "You've finally worked it out?"

Tarantulas had always said that creating a spark would be the hardest part of finishing his project. He'd started the project knowing about 90% of what he needed to do to ignite one—he wouldn't have started if he hadn't—but it was that last stubborn 10% he'd been working out ever since.

"I have! And all I need now is a suitable photonic crystal to put it in," he said cheerily. "Which means that I'm going to need to decide on his spark type soon. I would be most pleased if I could structure his spark based on the scans of someone with a spark I already know is a cut above the rest." The cuffs deactivated and fell into Prowl's lap. Tarantulas could feel Prowl's EM field involuntarily flare as the last of the cuffs' inhibiting effects stopped suppressing his spark's output, before the field settled back down. Tarantulas tapped the tip of his claw on Prowl's chest, over the spark casing. "If you would be so obliging, that is?”

"You...?" Prowl stared at Tarantulas for a long moment, jaw hanging slightly open. He apparently caught himself and snapped it shut. "I—honestly?"

"Who else's?" Tarantulas gently took Prowl's hands.

Prowl didn't respond for a moment. "I... When you said you were going to base his design off of mine, I thought you only meant his frame model. But—but he's going to have the same operating system? Scans from my _spark?_ That's..." He shook his head slowly, evidently trying to put his words in order.

"Not if you don't want it," Tarantulas said quickly. "If you'd rather not, I can randomize his spark. And he wouldn't be identical to you, of course—even if he has your custom coding, he certainly won't have your life experiences, your exact processor—"

"You want to give him my custom coding _on top of_ my operating system?"

Tarantulas winced at himself. "Ah. Yes, I was... going to bring that up next.”

Prowl grimaced, looking down at their joined hands, and then away. "Hm."

Tarantulas wilted, legs drooping. "You don't want it." He tried not to sound as disappointed as he felt. "I'm sorry. Very well. It was a... I suppose it must seem like I'm trying to duplicate you. I wanted only to _honor_ you, but..."

"It _is_ an honor." Prowl squeezed his hands tighter. "But I'm—I worry about—him. How it will affect him, having to live with... what I am. I don't know if I can, in good conscience... knowingly and deliberately make someone else have to—to be like me.”

Tarantulas's spark leaped into his throat. For a moment, he didn't say anything—just studying Prowl's turned away face. "Is it... so bad to be yourself?" he asked quietly.

"It's—" Prowl cut himself off. Tarantulas could imagine gears churning in his head as he turned his words over, trying to find where they fit. "It's not that it's _bad_. But."

"Would you... be otherwise, if you could? Reprogrammed, or—?"

"No!" Prowl said quickly. "No, no, I—I don't want to be anything but what I am. I don't." He paused, as though examining his own words; and said again, "I don't. If I was given the choice between inbuilt social skills and the ability to look at eight hundred and one moving objects without scrambling my circuits, versus—versus everything that _I am_, I'd choose what I am." He paused. "But I'd only make that choice for myself, based on hundreds of thousands of years of experience being me. It... feels... cruel, to make that choice for someone else."

Tarantulas considered that, running his thumbs over the back of Prowl's hands. "What if we selected the opposite, then?" he asked. "Gave him a more statistically common operating system and a totally randomized spark? Would that not still be making a choice for him—just the choice to guarantee that his inherent nature is _not_ like yours?"

"Yes, of course. But it's the..." Prowl trailed off. And then, looking farther away from Tarantulas, as though he already knew how his words were going to be received, finished, "it's the _better_ choice."

Tarantulas's spark throbbed like it had just tried to spin backwards.

He let go of one of Prowl's hands, gently cupped Prowl’s face, and tried to turn it. "Prowl," he said softly. "Face me, please." Prowl sighed and turned toward Tarantulas, gaze low, and Tarantulas turned off his optics and pressed the biolights on his forehead against Prowl's chevron. Softly, tenderly, and lovingly, he said, "Prowl, my dear, someday I'm going to track down every single mech who ever made you feel like the way you see the world is lesser than the way the average bot does, and I'm going to feed them one at a time through a very slow trash compactor."

Prowl snorted.

"I don't have to take your scans," Tarantulas said. "Not if you don't want. But I want to make it clear that, if I don't, it will be because you don't want me to—not because I think there is _anything_ wrong with making another mech exactly like you."

Prowl nodded, moving both of their heads. "I—will think about it. I'll let you know." Then he pulled back. Mesothulas's optics flashed back on. "Do you need help repairing your shoulder properly?" he asked. "Getting the, uh—the legs back?"

Prowl was changing the topic. Tarantulas decided to let him. "I don't think we'll have enough time before the Luna One energy transfer ends," he said. “I’ll probably have to turn out those subspace pockets and repair them myself before next month. I could use help repairing my wrist, though, once I switch back."

Prowl nodded distractedly, and then glanced up at the hole in the ceiling and the exposed starry sky. "Is the weather calm enough for us to get satellite signals right now, do you think?"

"It should be," Tarantulas said. "Why?"

"We ought to get a TV on," Prowl said. "We should be watching the news."

###

Most of the news was reporting current events from Cybertron's day side. There was a single brief news article about Iaconian enforcers performing some "operation" run by Sentinel Prime; the news described it as a training exercise, and then moved on. Just before dawn, there was an announcement that Sentinel had called for a press conference in Kaon, to begin as soon as he arrived in the city.

Prowl and Mesothulas sat on the floor in front of the TV. The wrist armor and plating on the back of Mesothulas's damaged hand had been removed. Prowl held Mesothulas's wrist still with one hand and passed him tools with the other, and Mesothulas carefully repaired himself as they discussed the upcoming press conference.

"It's going to be a cover up," Mesothulas said. "He's going to cover up as much as he can. The press conference is going to claim that dangerous murderer Overlord escaped custody and assassinated Ratbat, mark my words."

Prowl shrugged his free shoulder. "I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think he would have made it so easy for us to leave—with a datapad full of notes and subspace full of evidence, no less—if he was just going to try to cover it up. Remember, at the start of this he was planning to have our memories of this case erased.”

“Scrap. Have you put much thought into that? _Really_ thought about it?” Mesothulas said. “What if we’ve _already_ done jobs like this for him in the past and don’t remember?”

Prowl grimaced. “I’ve been trying not to think about that.”

“Anyway, he can refute our testimony easily. All you have is words you typed yourself and all I have is generic medical equipment."

"He wouldn't _have_ to refute it if he didn't let us escape," Prowl insisted. "He knows we're going to do everything in our power to get the information out. And if we _want_ to get real evidence, we know where to get it."

"Do we? If he decided to, the Institute could be half disassembled by now." Mesothulas nodded at the TV, "He's already claimed that the enforcers were at the Institute for a 'training exercise.'"

"No, the _news_ said that. We don't know where they got that, they didn't cite a source."

"Oh, like it came from anyone except Sentinel."

"We don't know that. Not for sure."

Mesothulas sighed irritably. "Why do you still want to defend him?" Prowl shut his mouth.

The news droned on: a million-year-old bridge in the Toraxxis Plains had collapsed under the weight of an overloaded trailer; the wind was going to be strong in Iacon today.

After a brief story about an asteroid scheduled to pass between Cybertron and Luna Two, Prowl said, "Because I think his actions are inconsistent with someone who plans to cover this up. Either he intends to expose this himself, or he wants us to do it for him."

Mesothulas looked up from his wrist. "What—? Oh, I thought you were, uh..." He dropped his gaze and sheepishly mumbled, "I thought I'd won that one."

"No, I was—reexamining my motives. I wanted to be certain that, based on the evidence, I really _do_ think he plans to expose this, and not just that I want that to be true."

"Hm." Mesothulas flexed his fingers, seeing how they moved. His thumb and first two fingers extended and curled back in; his last two didn't. He tisked and examined the connections in the back of his hand. "Well, if you're _that_ confident... then it's probably true."

A grateful smile nearly flickered across Prowl's face, but disappeared. "Obviously, whatever Sentinel does, we have to share what we know. Even if he shares the whole story—"

"Unlikely."

"—unlikely—the Senate will undoubtedly try to discredit whatever he says. I'll get to work turning my notes into a coherent report as soon as we're done repairing you."

Mesothulas nodded. "How much of it are you going to share?”

"God, I don't know yet. The Matrix being fake and used to mind-control the Prime, yes—and the brainwashed citizens. But should I mention that Sentinel's a head, or is that just—just cruel? On the one hand, it's important that the citizens know that Sentinel's been misrepresenting himself to the people; but on the other hand, there are plenty of citizens who will immediately turn against him just for being secretly _small_—and if we're presuming that it doesn't really _matter_ whether the Prime is a triplechanger or a head, wouldn't making a big deal of exposing it just... fan the flames of that sort of prejudice?"

"I think you're overthinking it. You should definitely expose him," Mesothulas said.

"I seem to remember you arguing that _your_ shape was a reason why I shouldn't arrest you."

"Well, of course. I was trying to avoid prison."

Prowl huffed. "And what about—what about _Shockwave?_ How the hell do I explain _that?_ Is it relevant to what we're trying to reveal to Cybertron? How do—how do I _explain_ that?"

Mesothulas hummed thoughtfully. "It might become relevant, if the senator doesn't resurface," he said. "Where _is_ he?"

"Are they—are they just one Shockwave? Ratbat reacted to the description of scientist Shockwave."

Mesothulas added, "And Sentinel acted—I don't know. Like they'd met?"

“Sentinel referred to scientist Shockwave as a senator while you were… And both Shockwaves have basically the same build. Same alt-mode, I'm pretty sure. A Senate-worthy spacecraft isn't exactly common."

"But how would that _work_?" Mesothulas asked. "He can't be—what—subspacing kibble like me? The same process invented independently? And to what end? What does he gain from pretending to be a vapid politician at some times and disguising himself as an empurata victim to talk about fringe science at others? What’s the _point_ of disguising himself if he’s going by the same name?”

"And if they _aren't_ the same Shockwave," Prowl said, "then where's the real senator? Did he ever get out of the building, or—?"

He fell silent as Sentinel appeared on the TV, the distinctive orange armor catching both of their attention. Mesothulas lowered his tool, and Prowl's grip on his hand loosened.

"Are we good? Is everyone ready to go?" Sentinel snapped. "Good. I've got three announcements to make today and I'm not taking questions until I’m done, so keep your damn hands down and your vocalizers shut."

Mesothulas murmured, "I make a point to avoid news featuring Sentinel—does he usually run press conferences like that?"

"He always wants to but no one lets him," Prowl said. "_I_ told him it seems practical. I was outvoted."

"He took a _vote?_"

"... Outshouted."

Mesothulas huffed.

"First," Sentinel said, "the Senate—I don't know how much of it, but _enough_—has been involved since at _least_ the beginning of my reign, possibly longer, in a plot to mind-control the reigning Prime with the use of a false Matrix. I've left the— Shut up." He pointed at a reporter who was waving frantically. "Shut up. I've left the thing we all _thought_ was the Matrix with Chief Engineer Tyrest to examine it and confirm this new finding, and I'll be submitting myself to a medical exam as soon as this is over to confirm the damage it's done to my spark casing. Although I’m sure you can all observe _some_ of the damage they’ve done to me.” He gestured to his own flickering optics.

"Think he'll let them see his head?" Mesothulas whispered. Prowl made a noncommittal noise.

"Consequently—I, uh, want them arrested. All of them. Right now." Sentinel raised his voice over several shouted questions. "_Except_ Senator Shockwave; he's the only senator I _know_ wasn't in on it. The _others_—I’m issuing an arrest warrant for _every one_ of them, effective immediately, under suspicion of conspiracy against the Primacy and treason against Cybertron. You can consider these words my signature. They'll be investigated one by one once they're in custody. Round 'em up first, sort 'em out later." The reporters exploded into questions.

Prowl laughed in shocked disbelief. "He used to talk about suspects like that. When we had a crime and an area where we thought the suspect was but couldn't narrow it down. Especially when the sole witness's description was 'I don't know what he looked like, but he had four legs.'"

"I think I'd rather see him put beastformers up on the Senate's level." Mesothulas turned his body toward the TV, thoughtlessly tried to prop his chin in his hand, and winced when it strained his half-repaired wrist. "But, I'm not going to lie, there's something satisfying about hearing the Prime kick the Senate down to beastformers' level."

"I think we might've picked up Ravage in one of those blind round-ups," Prowl mumbled.

Sentinel roared, "You'll be getting exclusive interviews with the Senate from inside their cells if you don't quiet down!" The reporters' questions abruptly cut off. "Second! As soon as Security Services has finished collecting it, I'm going to be presenting recently-revealed evidence that the Senate has been systematically brainwashing a lot _more_ people—from average citizens up to their own colleagues. This insidious practice has been corrupting the spark of our government for hundreds of thousands of years, at _least_—possibly since Nova Prime's reign ended—and it stops now."

Prowl's optics widened. “He’s _telling_ them.”

Mesothulas scoffed, and hissed, "'Insidious practice,' like Sentinel wasn't in favor of brainwashing dissidents until the Senate decided _he_ was one. What are the odds he'll cover up his own culpability?"

"Many of you have heard rumors about a place called 'the Institute,'" Sentinel said, ignoring the desperate hands beginning to raise in the crowd. "If you haven't—look it up. This is the sixth century, you all have the datanet. I am ashamed and disgusted to have to confirm that the Institute is not a wild conspiracy theory, but a real organization. An organization I am _ending_, effective _now_."

Prowl whispered to Mesothulas, "Eighty-two percent."

"Third, and last.” Sentinel said. He took a heavy vent in, scowling. "Due to the fact that I have never carried the real Matrix and don't have the _slightest_ idea where it is... I will, effective midnight, be abdicating the Primacy."

Mesothulas squeaked. Prowl clapped a hand over his mouth with an audible clang.

"If and when the real Matrix is found, I'll be happy to take back the title, should I still demonstrate Signs of Affinity strong enough to mark me as worthy of the office. But until then? If nobody has the Matrix, then _nobody_ gets to be the Prime. And we're just going to have to deal with that." Sentinel cast a venomous look around the room. "Questions?"

The reporters went from zero to riot in under a second. A banner covered the bottom quarter of the screen reading "SENTINEL ADBICATS PRIMACY," typo included. The camera focused on Sentinel swayed, fell, and stared dazedly at the ceiling. Another reporter knelt over him worriedly just before the feed went black and switched over to two jaw-dropped news anchors.

Wordlessly, Prowl lay down on his back.

###

"What if I'm called in?" Prowl asked. It was his twentieth _what if_ of the past hour, all of which he'd issued while flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. "I'm still a reserve enforcer in case a state of emergency is declared. I've been getting the stipend. What if there's anarchy? What if I have to go in?"

"Can you resign really quick?"

"You can't resign as a reserve enforcer during a state of emergency."

"But there's not a state of emergency _yet_. What if you resign before it starts?"

Prowl considered that. "No. There's a whole process to resign. We'd never get done in time."

Since Sentinel's press conference had ended, a solid stream of political and religious pundits had been shouting their opinions at increasingly overwhelmed talking heads. Through the miasma of heated words, one of the news anchors managed to squeeze in some breaking news: Senator Shockwave had announced he would be addressing the press from the steps of the Jhiaxian Academy's main hall at noon.

"Is that safe?" Mesothulas mumbled. "Where anyone can shoot at him?"

"Where _is_ safe for a senator now?" Prowl asked. "Who knows how much of the Triorian Guard is compromised. If there are any vengeful nuts who want to take a shot at a senator, they'll be swarming places like the Grand Imperium. Security Services is going to be hunting rather than defending the Senate."

Mesothulas considered that. "Fair. But. All the same, I think _walls_ would help him."

Prowl grunted.

By noon, Mesothulas had only managed to decide he wasn't going to be able to focus on his hand, get it to a point where he at least wouldn't damage it any more, and close up the plating.

Prowl sat up for the first time since Sentinel's abdication, scooted up to sit to Mesothulas's left, and examined Mesothulas's damaged hand. "I wonder how many other mechs are doing this?" he asked. "Sitting in front of their TVs, waiting to see where the hell our planet is going."

"You'd know better than me."

"I actually don't have any stored statistics about TV watching habits. Particularly not during global crises."

"_No_ TV statistics? Really? Not even one?”

Prowl looked up, thinking hard. "Nineteen percent of Security Services was watching the live broadcast where Warpath gestured without looking behind himself and accidentally backhanded me." Mesothulas snorted.

Somewhere in the background noise of the milling crowd waiting for Shockwave to speak, there was a sound of chanting; although it was completely impossible to hear what they were protesting for or against. Senator Shockwave took the podium that had been prepared for him, checked his microphones, and flashed the audience a smile that was simultaneously charming, solemn, and not quite fully covering up panic.

"His paint's fresh," Mesothulas muttered. "Overlord scratched it all to hell dragging him around, it has to be fresh. Do you think he painted himself purple and then back to pink and silver?"

"Scientist Shockwave's paint didn't look fresh."

"Maybe he's actually purple and all his other paint is a removable layer painted on top. It would explain why he keeps changing it, if he has to take it on and off anyway."

"My dear fellow citizens of Cybertron," Shockwave said. "As much as it means to me to have this opportunity to speak to all of you directly, the tragic circumstances that necessitate it are enough to dim anyone's spark. Today I don't just grieve _for_ you—for what the Senate of which I'm a member has done to you—but _with_ you. This morning, I learned that I, too, am one of the victims of the Institute..."

Over the murmurs in the crowd, Mesothulas sighed and leaned back on his elbows. "He's speechifying, he's going to speechify. You can hear it in his voice."

"Hm?" Prowl was trying to listen to both Shockwave and Mesothulas and succeeding at neither.

"He's got that—you know, the public speaking voice on. And his Primal Vernac accent is thicker."

"Hm." Shockwave was rolling into platitudes about the grave tragedy and injustice and whatnot. Prowl tried, with only marginally more success, to focus only on Mesothulas. "That look on his face, what's—what's he feeling?"

"I'm pretty sure that's abject terror."

"Ah. Good. I thought it was something like that. He's probably not supposed to be showing that, is he?"

"Well. I'm sure he's _trying_ not to."

"He's probably not alone," Prowl said. "I really _do_ wonder, how many people are just... watching. Like this. It's like the entire future as we anticipated it has just—vanished. And now we have to wait to see what the new future is going to be." He paused. "How many managers do you think are letting their workers watch TV? Does the dissolution of the government warrant a day off work?”

Mesothulas shrugged. "Moments like this make me regret not sticking with sociology. This is—it's so _pivotal_, it would be _fascinating_ to see how the actions of just a couple of people ripple out to affect an entire species."

"I didn't know you studied sociology."

"Briefly. I'm fascinated by the macro aspects of Cybertronian society—it’s like a living organism with billions of tiny parts.” (Prowl nodded deeply; he’d heard Mesothulas wax poetic about that before.) “But I couldn't care about the micro enough to stick with it. It's unfortunate that something as interesting as _civilization_ has to be made up of something as tedious as _individual people_."

"Hm." Prowl slid next to Mesothulas, leaned against him, and wrapped an arm around his back.

Mesothulas gave him a puzzled look. "What...?"

Prowl leaned his head on the tire on Mesothulas's previously-injured shoulder. "Of all the people I could face the upheaval of society as we know it with…” He trailed off, leaving the rest implied.

In the silence, Shockwave's speech crawled on: "... how devastated I was to learn about the fate my colleagues face, even if I accept and understand the order; and, at last, how _humbled_ I am by the burden of being, at the moment, the only legally-recognized senator—and, with Sentinel Prime abdicating tonight, the de facto leader of Cybertron."

Prowl gasped sharply.

Mesothulas hissed, "Wait—is that _true?_ He—?"

"Of course it's true—I didn't realize..."

They fell silent as Shockwave went on: "Although this is the first time in the history of our unified Cybertron that this has come into play, our ancient law established under Nova Prime's rule strictly states that the Senate cannot legally convene without four members: the Princeps Senatus, who leads but does not vote, and three voting members, the minimum number to ensure there can be dissent but never a tie vote. All senators are responsible for maintaining a record of candidates they've appointed to succeed their seats in the event of debilitating injury or death; however, if they're all being _arrested_, then their listed candidates are no longer legally valid replacements. Therefore, it falls to me to appoint… at least, an _interim_ Senate, until Security Services' investigations have run their course and we can determine how many of my fellow senators are innocent. I..."

Shockwave laughed awkwardly, shoulders sagging. "I, of course, wasn't the least bit prepared for such a—a massive responsibility. At this moment in time, I am only prepared to present to you the minimum three legally mandated senators."

He turned, gesturing toward the front door of the main hall. It swung open, revealing a familiar bulky red and blue truck. "No surprise," Prowl muttered, "they were thick as thieves the one time I saw them together. I sh—" He stepped out, revealing the next mech behind him, and Prowl fell silent.

Shockwave gestured at the trio. "It's my honor to introduce you to Orion Pax of Iacon," he said, "Starscream of Vos, and Soundwave of Kaon."

Prowl and Mesothulas were dead silent.

Prowl's processor fans clicked on. Mesothulas studied the screen for any hint of satisfaction on Shockwave’s face behind his apparent fear. They mentally played back every conversation they'd had with Shockwave—either Shockwave—since their investigation into the New Society of the Resurrected Death.

Senator Shockwave's invitation to the party, delivered the same day that Scientist Shockwave saw Prowl and Mesothulas at work against Overlord—Overlord, who had been the one to haul Senator Shockwave out of Prowl and Mesothulas's sight shortly before Scientist Shockwave showed up in the Institute—the Institute, which both Shockwaves professed a familiarity with despite acting as though, unlike Ratbat, they didn't know what it really did—Ratbat, who hadn't wanted to hire Prowl and Mesothulas after seeing that they'd defy a senator until Senator Shockwave had argued that their protection of Soundwave proved they were ideal for the position—Soundwave, whom Scientist Shockwave had spirited away almost immediately after Prowl and Mesothulas had investigated him at the behest of Ratbat, to whom Prowl and Mesothulas had been referred by Senator Shockwave at the party—the party, which they'd _thought_ Senator Shockwave had invited them to because he’d developed an interest in them because they'd helped Mirage, a graduate of the Jhiaxian Academy—the same school that had been attended by Skywarp and Thundercracker, roommates of Starscream—Starscream, whom Mesothulas had _seen_ Shockwave talking to in Overlord's cult; Starscream, who was himself a former senator and now a senator again—senator alongside Soundwave, newly promoted former employee of Ratbat, the sole senator who wasn't _wanted_ but _dead_, apparently executed by Overlord while Senator Shockwave, apparently, was spared—

They were both struck with the sickening feeling that, perhaps, the Institute wasn't the only secret conspiracy they'd been dragged into.

###

The generator-powered recharge slab Mesothulas had in his secret lab was slag, but Prowl _felt_ like slag, so he plugged in, collapsed, remained conscious just long enough to carefully position one of Mesothulas's homemade web shammies so that it exactly covered his optics without obscuring any of his cranial vents, and immediately plummeted into heavy recharge.

Mesothulas couldn't sleep. He tinkered distractedly with his wrist even though the damage had long since been repaired, hopping between channels as if any of them had anything different to share, bouncing between shots of JAAT and Security Services and the Institute—it looked so mundane from above—and random commentators' faces and the empty Grand Imperium and...

He'd been stopped for a while on Starscream's stupid smug face to hate-watch him. He was talking like he couldn't "share _all_ the details yet, of course" but nevertheless was at liberty to hint that the investigation that led to these devastating findings had been ongoing for months, and that he'd been involved in them. And the worst part was that Mesothulas didn't know if he was wholesale making things up, repeating some script Shockwave had given him, or actually telling the truth.

"And for their contributions to the investigation," Starscream said, gesturing in a grand, _obviously_ senatorial way and _why did nobody believe he was Senator Ulchtar_, "on behalf of Senator Shockwave, I would like to offer a public thank you to Prowl of Petrex and Mesothulas of Uraya," (Mesothulas dropped his screwdriver) "who have been secretly assisting with this investigation for the past four months—at great personal and professional cost, I'm given to understand." He winked, smirking. Mesothulas almost tried to punch him through the screen. "As the investigation proceeds, Senator Shockwave looks forward to speaking with them again very soon."

Mesothulas picked up his screwdriver and chucked it weakly at the screen. "'_Secretly investigating_,'" he mimicked, in a poor copy of Starscream's high-pitched rasp. "So secretly he didn't even bother to tell _us_ about it, _hmph._" What was Starscream’s message supposed to be—a boast? Was Shockwave showing off how long he'd had them dancing at the end of his strings?

Or maybe he was doing them a favor. Their professional reputation _had_ taken a devastating blow after the Starscream incident. By claiming they'd been part of the investigation since half a month before the Starscream story broke—and giving Starscream himself the message to deliver, no less—Shockwave had immediately transformed Prowl and Mesothulas from two ghost-peddling con artists into undercover investigators who'd heroically allowed their names to be dragged through the mud in the interest of the public good.

And they couldn't say a word about all the things they suspected Shockwave _might_ have done without rejecting their newly-regained credibility.

Mesothulas glowered at Starscream until his face disappeared off the screen. Then he paused the channel, rewound, and recorded the sequence to show Prowl when he woke up.

###

"Do you really think it's a good idea to issue demands to Shockwave?" Mesothulas asked. He was sitting on the ground next to the recharge slab, arms crossed and head resting on top. "Through Sentinel, no less?"

Prowl, still plugged into the recharge slab, paused typing in his comm unit to answer. "I'm not issuing demands. I'm scheduling an appointment."

"You're asking for it to be at Security Services Headquarters."

"I'm suggesting a location."

"A location biased in our favor."

"Of course I'm suggesting a location biased in our favor, who would suggest a location biased _against_ their own favor?"

Mesothulas supposed he had a point there. He shrugged.

"Anyway, do _you_ want to meet Shockwave at the Jhiaxian Academy? Because I'd rather meet with him somewhere I'll be surrounded by people I know."

"Okay, okay, fair. What if he gets offended, though?"

Prowl shrugged. "Then he insists we meet at the Jhiaxian Academy and we don't lose anything for trying?"

"I think we'd lose, like, political points," Mesothulas said. "It's probably some kind of faux pas that we're asking him to do something in our own favor instead of... cleverly manipulating circumstances in our favor in a way he can't argue against but can't take offense to."

Prowl considered that. "Do you have a way to cleverly manipulate circumstances in our favor?"

"Hm." Mesothulas looked at the ceiling. "Nnnot off the top of my head."

"Do you have any alternatives better than proposing we meet at Security Services."

"No," he admitted.

"I'm going to keep typing. Let me know if you think of something better."

"Mm, fair enough." Mesothulas climbed onto the recharge slab and slouched beside Prowl. It was late evening—which meant that, having just woken up, Prowl's sleep schedule _should_ have been shot to hell; but knowing him, he'd probably go right back to sleep and wake up in the morning like a normal person. And Mesothulas would once again be alone with his wildly erratic sleep schedule.

Which was fine, he was used to it. It gave him time to work on his own projects undisturbed. And he liked watching Prowl sleep.

"Sending. I'm going to ask him to bring Soundwave too; I'd like to speak with him. Any final protests?"

"Starscream and Orion might think we're slighting them."

“I don’t really care if they think that. Do you?“

"Nah."

“Sent." Prowl immediately started typing again.

"What now?"

"I'm updating Jazz. I want him to know about the possibility that we'll be there."

Mesothulas fell quiet, watching the sky change color through the hole in the roof.

Okay, that was enough stillness. He stood and wandered over to his vast array of lab equipment, looking for something unfinished he could fiddle with. "You know, meeting at Security Services still won't quite give us a _total_ advantage," he said. "Shockwave and Sentinel can fly. They'll get to Kaon faster than us and have time to set up."

"What does Soundwave turn into?"

"Dunno. We don't have a guarantee they'll bring him just because we asked, though."

Prowl considered that. Then he unplugged from the recharge slab. "Maybe we should head to Kaon tonight, then. We can be waiting ten minutes from Security Services and head over as soon as he agrees to a meeting time." He stood. "We've got to make a stop before Security Services, anyway."

Well, so much for Prowl putting himself back on a normal sleep schedule. Mesothulas set back down the mess of wires he'd been trying to remember what he'd been planning to do with. "Then let's. Who are we visiting?"

###

"You can take us to Soundwave?!"

Even though it was about midway between midnight and dawn (and Mesothulas had insisted that there was no reason to wait for a more reasonable hour to knock, "If they aren't awake, they just won't answer,") Ravage had come to the door wide awake and alert—and was even more alert now. Through the dark doorway, Prowl and Mesothulas could see the birds shifting around.

"In a few hours," Prowl said. It had been shortly after midnight when Sentinel, now no longer Prime, texted back to let him know that both Shockwave and Soundwave had agreed and what time they'd all be at Security Services.

"Where is he?" Ravage went on. "Is he safe? Is he in trouble?"

"Uh." Prowl frowned. "Ye—n—Yes to the being safe—"

"Hold on," Mesothulas said. "Haven't you three seen the news?"

"Never pay attention to news," Buzzsaw mumbled sleepily from the back of the shop. "S'all bad."

Worriedly, Ravage said, ”He's been in the news? Why? What happened?"

"_Oh_. He's—"

"_Prowl!_ Shh shh sh!" Mesothulas drummed on his shoulder excitedly. "Don't ruin the surprise."

"But—"

"Prowl!"

"But th—"

"_Please_, Prowl? Please please please?"

Prowl gave Mesothulas an uncertain look, then looked back at Ravage. "It's... a _good_ surprise?"

Ravage squinted at Prowl.

"We're in!" Laserbeak swooped out, landing on Mesothulas's shoulder. Buzzsaw followed a moment later, calling, "I'm riding in front this time."

Ravage grimaced and looked at Prowl. "Can I ride with you?"

Prowl spent a little bit too long thinking about the horror of having a near stranger sit on top of him. "... That's fine," he lied. "Just don't touch my light bar."

###

Jazz was waiting for them when they arrived. He'd been up all night, too—"Running the weirdest mechhunt I've ever been part of," he said tiredly, since Sentinel was too busy dealing with the media and the process of his own abdication to supervise the searches himself. Jazz let them all sit in his office, where the only thing they said to each other while they waited was a mumbled nonspecific apology about Starscream and just as vague an acceptance. Jazz monitored the incoming transmissions from the other members of Security Services while everyone else tried not to fall asleep.

The first sign they had that the mechs they'd come to see had arrived was when Ravage's head shot up, nose twitching, and he bolted out of Jazz's office and down the hall. Shouting, the birds followed him. Mesothulas, slouching so low he was almost falling out of his chair, pulled himself upright with a long groan. "Is that them?"

"Dunno," Prowl mumbled, optics off. "Which way did they go?"

"Kinda toward the entrance," Jazz said.

"Mm." Prowl tilted his head back and forth, stretching his sore neck cables.

Jazz checked the time.

From several halls away, Ravage shrieked, "A _SENATOR?!_"

Mesothulas laughed so hard he slid out of his chair and collapsed on the floor.

###

Sentinel was glowering dully over his shoulder at Soundwave and his friends when he reached Jazz's office, and Mesothulas was deeply tempted to ask him which part of the scene he disapproved of—the new senator socializing with beastformers, or the hugging. "You three can use my office," Sentinel said, gesturing for them to follow. "It's soundproofed. I need to see how the round-up is going, anyway."

"What materials do you use for that?" Mesothulas asked. "The soundproofing, I mean."

Sentinel grunted. "Haven't a clue."

"Hm." Well, Mesothulas could find out. "... Is going to the soundproofed room _necessary?_" It kind of defeated the purpose of having this meeting on territory familiar to Prowl if all his friends outside couldn't hear if they started screaming.

"Shockwave insisted."

Mesothulas told himself it was probably because Shockwave wanted to discuss still-classified information.

"Is it still your office?" Prowl asked. "I mean—long term, going forward—"

"It's the office of the head of Security Services," Sentinel said gruffly. "Which is what I am. Nothing says the head has to be a Prime."

"Ah."

Too bad, Mesothulas thought; Sentinel could still do plenty of damage running a building of elite enforcers. But, at least he wasn't the one deciding policy. Or the de facto leader of a half dozen of Cybertron's largest religions.

They came to a stop in front of a corner office. Mesothulas sidled through the open door, glancing out the window and studying the filing cabinets. Sentinel took a step closer to the door to watch him.

Prowl said, "I wanted to say, I—think you mostly made the right decision."

"'Mostly.'"

"Well. There were a few omissions."

Sentinel reached involuntarily toward his neck. "There's no reason to..."

"Not what you are," Prowl said quietly. "What you've done."

Sentinel regarded Prowl silently, then glanced past him and said, "Sir." Mesothulas turned his full attention toward the door.

Chipperly, Shockwave said, "That's weird, isn't it? You calling me 'sir' again. I'd hardly gotten used to calling _you_ 'sir.'"

"I think most of the Senate had trouble with seeing me as their superior," Sentinel said dryly.

"Oh, I didn't mean it that way." Shockwave swept into the room, putting a hand on Prowl's back to sweep him in too. Prowl automatically stiffened as he followed, and Mesothulas resisted the urge to go insert himself between Prowl and the unwelcome touch. "Hi! Hello! So good to see you two." He gave them a quick smile and waved at the controls to slide the door shut. "Sorry if I seem a bit harried, I've been _very_ busy since yesterday—but I wanted to make time especially to see you two." He paused next to the desk, pointed at Sentinel's chair, said, "Do you think I can sit here?" and then immediately did so. "Sit, sit."

Prowl sat. Mesothulas turned around, and realized there was only one chair for guests. He gingerly sat on the corner of Sentinel's desk.

Shockwave rolled on, "I hope you don't mind that I sprung that 'part of an ongoing investigation' story on you two? I assume you've seen that by now?"

"Saw it on TV yesterday," Mesothulas said.

"Been reading editorials on it," Prowl added. Mesothulas looked at him. When had he found time to do _that?_

"Yes, well—I thought it would help smooth things over for you, what with everything you've been through lately—plus we had to explain why Starscream's not dead and all, obviously we can't say he's _Ulchtar_, not when he's still wanted in Vos for embezzling—"

"Then why is he on the new Senate?" Prowl asked evenly. "You made quite a point of how none of the other senators' candidates for the positions were now legally valid. And a disgraced precinct senator wanted for crimes against his people _is_ legally valid?"

Mesothulas tried not to squirm on his improvised seat. Sure, _he_ could prod at politicians when they did something he didn't approve of, but it was more nerve-racking when Prowl did it. He had a higher chance of seriously torquing off a senator by accident (rather than, like Mesothulas, mildly torquing them off, and on purpose). Not that he would usually _care_ if a senator was mad at them—but he had something he wanted to ask Shockwave, actually.

Shockwave's smile wavered. "It's... it's not ideal," he said, lowering his voice despite the soundproofing. "But he's now the only person in the Grand Imperium besides me who has any experience governing—even if all his experience _is_ in local government. If he gets out of line, Orion can handle him, and Soundwave—well—will probably be able to tell if he's planning anything..."

"Then why not someone else with experience?" Prowl pressed. "Like Momus, or—or Sherma? They both abdicated before Sentinel was named Prime. Doesn't Sentinel's arrest order only cover _current_ senators? Why not appoint those two?"

Shockwave's smile vanished completely. Mesothulas was struck with terror that Prowl had overstepped his bounds and just burned the best bridge they had with the new government. For a moment, Shockwave stared at Prowl.

Then he said, "Because I completely forgot about them." He propped his elbows on Sentinel's desk and slouched forward, dropping his face in his hands. "Ohhh, my gods. I made the decision in about twenty minutes and the three of them were _there_. It was a... Honestly, not my best..." He laughed weakly. "Well. There's senators four and five, I suppose."

He flopped down, head thunking to the desk. Mesothulas and Prowl looked at each other.

After a moment, Shockwave said, "_Sorry_. Sorry. Let me just..." He sat up, pressed his fingers to his optics, took a deep breath in, and then laced his hands on Sentinel's desk and smiled. "Right. Thank you for the suggestion. You're every bit the practical mech Sentinel assured me you were."

"Oh," Prowl said. Mesothulas could see him searching for what he was supposed to say to that. "Good." Mesothulas was pretty sure he'd been reaching for _thank you_.

Close enough though; Mesothulas turned his attention back to Shockwave. He still needed an opportunity to ask...

"Anyway," Shockwave said. "I wanted to say that I sincerely hope I'll be able to continue to call upon you to help investigate unusual cases in the future." Mesothulas wondered if they would be told _ahead_ of time what the exact case they were involved in was. "And also, I wanted to offer you compensation for _this_ case. All that work to figure out that the Matrix is fake and everything that's happened because of it, and you never even got paid, did you?"

"I want the fake Matrix!" Mesothulas blurted out. "As soon as you're done with it. At _least_ the crystal. Once you're finished with whatever examination you need to do on it. For—for reasons." He could feel Prowl staring at him.

"Done," Shockwave said. "I'll send it by your place."

"Hold on," Prowl said, "that's evidence of a major crime. You can't just hand it out."

"I called dibs," Mesothulas said.

Shockwave said, "The crystal, from what we can tell so far, is decorative. All the mnemosurgical technology was in the casing."

"But it's still evidence!"

"Dibs," Mesothulas said firmly. Shockwave shrugged.

Prowl sighed. "Fine," he said. "But, before we get too far from the topic of Starscream—I know how you know Orion Pax, obviously, but... out of curiosity, whhhere, precisely, did you find Starscream and Soundwave?"

Oh—that was an excellent question. And... considering the subterfuge they'd been put through so far, an incredibly dangerous question. Mesothulas looked at Shockwave warily.

Shockwave smiled.

Shockwave continued smiling.

Shockwave took a slow breath in. “I’m… actually, hoping that finding out how I know them will be one of the first things I hire you two to help investigate. I don't know that it's even _paranormal_; but given your combined breadth of professional expertises..."

That was nowhere on the list of answers Mesothulas had expected. He had no idea what it meant. He had no idea where it would lead. He kind of loved it. "Sorting out whether something is paranormal or not accounts for the majority of our jobs!" He looked at Prowl, clasping his hands together: _please?_

Prowl gave him a long, wide-opticked look. And then turned slowly to Shockwave. "We're... gonna need a vacation before we do another job for a senator."

"Yes, yes of course," Shockwave said quickly. "Naturally. A well-deserved one. And I really need to be focusing on—well. The whole planet." He huffed. "I'll give you some time before I contact you about the matter."

Prowl nodded, visibly relieved. "Thank you, sir."

###

"Prowl. A moment.” Sentinel broke off from his conversation and hurried to catch up with Prowl and Mesothulas, and then kept walking, forcing them to follow him into a hallway before they slowed. "I've been thinking about what you said. About omissions."

"Oh?" Prowl's hopes rose.

"You have never been a fan of retributive justice, have you?" Sentinel asked. "I recall your preference for rehabilitative or restorative justice. Asking criminals to make up for their crimes, rather than to rust away in cells for them. Correct?"

Prowl's hopes sank. "Yes, sir. That's correct."

"If a mech has committed crimes—crimes which he _won't_ commit again—and wishes to put himself to work making amends for them... he can't do that very well from inside Garrus-1, can he?"

And there it was. Prowl was silent a moment. "Is he going to make amends?" he asked. "Does he think he's done anything he needs to make amends for?"

"He's... coming around."

Prowl glanced at Mesothulas. Mesothulas surreptitiously rolled his optics. Ah, good, they were on the same page.

But, if Sentinel _was_ going to try to undo some of the harm he'd caused—even if it _was_ just to justify keeping himself out of prison—as an ex-Prime, the power and resources he still commanded and could turn to good...

"No, I don't suppose such a mech could do very much for Cybertron if he was locked in a cell," Prowl said. "He'd only be capable of contributing to the greater good on the streets."

Sentinel nodded firmly. "I thought you'd agree."

"And if it turned out he'd only promised to make up for his past crimes to avoid prosecution, his future behavior—or, rather, misbehavior—would certainly reveal that," Prowl said. “Wouldn’t it?”

Sentinel hesitated, then nodded more slowly. “Yes. No doubt.”

“And so, when the hypothetical mech in question is on trial for his crimes—if I were to be called to the trial to present testimony, I would _absolutely_ urge that his sentencing allow him that opportunity to make amends, with heavy supervision and stringent rules as to how he ought to be imprisoned if he deviates from his commitment.”

Mesothulas seized Prowl's elbow. Prowl forced himself to make direct optic contact with Sentinel.

Sentinel glowered down at Prowl. And then he smiled. "Fair. Very fair."

Prowl had no idea if the smile was supposed to be menacing or approving. He nodded.

"When will you be publishing your report?"

"As soon as I have time to write it and run it through peer review." In this case, "peer review" probably meant Jazz. And maybe—unfortunately—Orion Pax.

"You really should have stayed in Security Services."

"If I had, I wouldn't be the kind of mech willing to consider second chances." He reached over to squeeze the hand on his elbow.

Mesothulas waited until they were out of Sentinel's audial range before he murmured, “You let me off lighter than the Prime. I’m flattered.”

"Ex-Prime," Prowl corrected. “And I didn’t let him off lighter. I gave him the same offer I gave you: a chance to reform, under conditions of transparency and supervision proportionate to his power in society. Absolute power demands absolute transparency.”

“You don’t have anybody supervising _me_.”

“What do you think _I_ am?”

Mesothulas snickered. ”I know you don't think much of your verbal skills, but I think you've got the only mind on Cybertron that could come up with a way to blackmail someone into good behavior and make it sound like an act of mercy."

When he wasn't trying to pose a thought exercise on empathy and accidentally making it sound like blackmail. "And imagine. Soon there will be two of those minds running around."

Mesothulas's optics shot to Prowl's face, wide and questioning. Prowl nodded, offering the slightest smile.

Mesothulas seized him in a hug tight enough to dent his bumper.

###

When they left Security Services, Soundwave waved them over. At some point, he'd apparently relocated to sit on the front steps of the building, beneath the tunnel over the long driveway leading out from the front door, with Ravage in his lap, the birds on either shoulder, and three Triorian Guards in the general area pretending they weren't watching him like hawks.

When they approached, Soundwave said quietly, "Prime: defied; Soundwave: impressed." He paused, then amended himself: "_Senator_ Soundwave: impressed."

"You overheard that?" Mesothulas asked, voice hushed. "Exactly what _is_ your hearing range?"

Soundwave made a so-so gesture with a hand.

"I can't believe it," Buzzsaw lamented, shaking his head. "_Senator_. Now we're going to have to make him leave the room before we talk slag about politicians."

Laserbeak pecked Soundwave’s head, making him flinch. "Are you going to finally do something about the pothole in our alley, senator?"

"You don't drive. Pothole: irrelevant."

Prowl mumbled, "_I_ wouldn't mind if that pothole was filled."

"Prowl: not constituent."

"We had a question, actually," Mesothulas said excitedly, "about your abilities—_questions_, really, and that's the thing—we were wondering whether, er, whether you'd... like to learn more about your talent? If you're amenable, we'd—we'd examine you, for our own edification and _possibly_ the eventual edification of Cybertron, share the results with you..."

"When it doesn't conflict with your new duties, of course," Prowl said.

"Yes, of course!"

Ravage bristled, trying to stand. "You want him locked up in a _lab?_"

"Negative; voluntary visits only." Soundwave patted him firmly, rubbing his back until Ravage reluctantly sank back down on his lap. Soundwave glanced between Prowl and Mesothulas. "Correct?"

"Precisely," Mesothulas said, and Prowl nodded.

Soundwave nodded more slowly. "I will take it under consideration," he said. "I will contact you when I have an answer."

Mesothulas bowed his head. "We'll await your contact."

Prowl said, "Before we go—I have another question."

"Shockwave," Soundwave said. "Shockwaves."

Prowl nodded.

"Classified: where we went; what he wanted," Soundwave said. "I went willingly."

"He wouldn't tell us, either," Laserbeak groused.

"And...?" Prowl tipped his head up, indicating Senator Shockwave somewhere in the Security Services building above. "Is _he_...? Or is that classified, too?”

Soundwave glanced up. "Unknown," he said. "Soundwave: cannot read. Mind, Senator Shockwave's: dark; hard; undetectable." He paused. "Mind, other Shockwave's: the same."

It confirmed nothing; but it suggested a whole hell of a lot, didn't it? "Thank you."

Soundwave nodded in farewell. "I will tell you more when I find out, if you tell me when you do."

###

Prowl and Mesothulas had been on the road for some time—stuck, of course, in the late morning Kaon traffic—before Prowl asked, "What are you going to _do_ with the fake Matrix? Keep it as a trophy of the case? Incorporate it in the business sign we don’t have?”

Mesothulas laughed. "Wouldn't that look classy! How's this for a slogan we can put under the sign: 'Making the Impossible Obsolete'?"

Prowl was silent a moment. "... You heard that?"

"I heard that." Mesothulas giggled, swerving over to bump Prowl's side. "But, no. I've got a little side project I can use it in.”

###

It was a dark and stormy night.

The first dark and stormy night in Iacon's abandoned warehouse district since Prowl and Mesothulas had received the fake Matrix, after an excruciating months-long wait for it. Under a glass canopy that barely kept Mesothulas's work table dry, he was installing the final components—an "abnormal" brain module with a copy of Prowl's base coding, a gently used triplechanger t-cog, and a _flawless_ lab-fabricated photonic crystal laced with a synthetic impression of Prowl's spark signature—into a strapped-down frame that would have looked like one of a million cold constructed bots with the mix-and-match kibble frame model, if not for the fact that it was so big and jury-rigged to transform into both a car and a helicopter.

"Look, it's just—_I_ know where the name comes from, but to everyone else, it's going to sound like faux Primal Vernacular," Prowl shouted over the constant thunder. He was waiting near the wall, squinting and shielding his optics to keep out as much of the strobe light show above as possible. "And people with Primal Vernacular names who aren't old enough to have actually spoken it always sound—I don't know—fake-classy. And since he'll _look_ cold constructed..."

Mesothulas looked at Prowl, lifted his chin, and said, "If _you_ want to name a person, you can build your _own_."

"Okay. All right." Prowl shrugged.

Mesothulas finished fixing a lightning rod to the body's spark casing and stabilizing it against the chest, suddenly rushed over to Prowl, and kissed him hard. "Ready?"

"Whenever you are."

Mesothulas didn't so much run as skip back to the frame. He turned back to Prowl, optics bright and hands laced together in glee. "Elevate me!"

Prowl pulled a lever on the wall and then hurried to his position in the ring of lab equipment surrounding the center table. Massive pistons deep beneath the warehouse, originally designed to lift heavy goods between different warehouse floors, engaged for only the third time in centuries. They groaned and complained, but after the repairs Mesothulas had done between their two test runs a month ago, they lifted the platform in the middle of Mesothulas's lab smoothly. The canopy folded aside, and Mesothulas lifted into the sky with the body. Prowl watched his silhouette nervously against the lightning.

"The ancient teachers of this science," Mesothulas cried, in what _definitely_ sounded like a rehearsed statement, "promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But now—with my work at _last_ having reached its pinnacle under the guidance of your cunning, artful hand—we step into the future—and we _fulfill_ the promises of the ancients! We transform ourselves _into_ chimeras—we _possess_ the elixir of life. We have penetrated deeper into the mysteries of life and death, the subtle secrets of the Cybertronian spark, and even the esoteric mind of the Matrix itself than any mechs heretofore—"

"Did you write a _speech?!_"

Mesothulas immediately broke down into laughter. "Only a little one!"

"You're going to get electrocuted!" Prowl was trying not to smile.

"Oh, shhh— Get ready!"

Prowl nodded, hand on a lever and optics on Mesothulas, whose optics were on the sky.

"Get set!" Mesothulas slowly raised a hand; then he flung it down. "Go!"

Prowl pulled the lever. From subspace pockets Mesothulas had installed around the edge of his platform, four more far taller lightning rods raised around the lab table. Mesothulas ran between them, grabbing chains and connecting them to the body's lightning rod, while Prowl held his breath and hoped Mesothulas didn't get shocked before he'd connected them.

But all four were now connected; and a moment later, they'd stretched high enough that bolts of lightning began jumping down between them, one after another. Prowl had to clap his hands over his audials to block out the constant cracks of thunder, shutting one optic and barely squinting the other; his doors burned from all the static in the air.

He didn't hear Mesothulas so much as guess his words from his frantic gesturing: "Throw the second switch!"

Prowl let go of one one audial just long enough to turn on a pump. Glass tubes full of Shockwave's strange brew, the elixir of life, burbled and pulsed as the energon was pumped up long tubes to the platform above and into the electrified body, like a makeshift recharge slab.

"_Throw the third switch!_"

Prowl took a deep breath—if things were ever going to explode, it was going to be now—and flipped it. An electric current shot up a cable to the table. Somewhere up there, the elixir of life was _supposed_ to be igniting around the spark casing, and if it happened just right...

Nothing exploded. Mesothulas wasn't dead yet. Prowl hurried back to the lift lever and waited. Every bolt of lightning felt like it was stabbing straight through his optic into his brain module. Nevertheless, Prowl kept watching—monitoring his own error messages to make sure he wasn't going to glitch out while Mesothulas was still up in the air, but otherwise ignoring the pain to watch the silhouette above.

"Life!" Mesothulas screamed at the sky, his voice nearly lost under the crackling thunder. "Life, do you hear me?! Give my creation life!"

Prowl stood, hand clenched on the lever, until Mesothulas waved at him. He flipped it, ran back to lower the lightning rods and turn off the pump and power, and then stood just outside the perimeter of the lowering platform, waiting to step on and hurry to Mesothulas's side as soon as the platform was low enough. Mesothulas and the frame's armor were both visibly crackling with energy. Mesothulas was leaning over the table, one hand on the frame's chest near its exposed spark casing, the other on its forehead. Prowl put a hand on Mesothulas's shoulder and received a sharp snap of static.

For a long moment, all three were still, waiting.

The frame's biolights flickered. Prowl and Mesothulas both started, then froze again, not entirely sure it wasn't a trick of the lightning or the rain. The biolights flashed again, and glowed solidly. One hand twitched.

"Alive," Mesothulas gasped, "it's alive. It's alive!" Prowl jerked away a step as Mesothulas abruptly straightened, threw back his head, and cackled with mandibles streched toward the sky—until he choked on the rain and started coughing.

Prowl looked disapprovingly at the canopy. That was _supposed_ to have moved back in place when the lift lowered. He re-covered his audials.

The frame's optics flicked on. He squinted quizzically up at Mesothulas.

"Ah—aheh—_hello_ there." Mesothulas bent back over his creation, instantaneously switching from maniacal to tender. "I'm going to set you free. Ready?" He started unlatching the restraints holding the frame in place. Prowl quickly moved to undo the ankle restraints. "There—can you sit up?"

The new mech made a low groaning sound, barely audible under the storm. But slowly, face screwed up in concentration, he sat up.

"Good, very good! Can you stand for me?"

The new mech raised his hands and covered the sides of his head, optics squeezed shut. He bent forward, groaning more loudly.

"Wh—?" For a moment, Mesothulas stared at him in helpless terror; then he turned to Prowl. "The storm! Prowl, how are you?"

With both hands over his audials again and about twelve percent of his usual optic surface area exposed, he said flatly, "In hell." Wasn't _Mesothulas?_

"Then so is he. Help me, help me get him up—" Together, they wrapped their arms around the new mech’s back, tugged him forward until he slid off the table and stood unsteadily, and carried him to the warehouse’s basement.

Once the door was shut, the mech tentatively lowered his hands and opened his optics, and then more confidently examined his surroundings. He looked between Mesothulas and Prowl, and offered them a mild, content smile.

Mesothulas squeezed his hands together so tightly they shook, and squealed. "That's a yes to locomotion! What about speech? Can you say something for us?"

He continued smiling mildly.

"'Hello,' perhaps?" Mesothulas offered. "Or—my name's Mesothulas, can you say 'Mesothulas'?"

"My name might be easier," Prowl said.

"No offense, but I'll be devastated if he says your name before mine."

The mech looked between them again and made a quiet humming sound.

Mesothulas's shoulders drooped slightly. "You can't speak?"

He hummed doubtfully.

"I couldn't talk initially," Prowl confessed. "I had to get a patch for it. I thought the patch would've been incorporated deeply enough into my base coding that it would have been in the copy you made, but maybe not."

"Ah! As long as it's normal, then." Mesothulas was immediately back up to full brightness. "Hello, dear. I'm Mesothulas, as I've told you. I _made_ you." Mesothulas put a hand on Prowl's shoulder. "This is Prowl. Most of you is based off of his raw blueprints—body, spark, brain module." He reached up to put his other hand on the mech's shoulder. "And _you_—your name is Ostaros."

It was a hell of a name to burden a mech with, Prowl still thought—but, he'd get used to it. He mouthed it silently to himself a couple of times, trying to ensure that he would never forget how it was pronounced for a second—glanced at Ostaros's face, and saw him silently doing the same thing.

"It's such a delight to finally meet you!” Mesothulas said. And then he burst into sobs.

Ostaros leaned back, giving him an alarmed look, then looked at Prowl for help.

"He's okay." Prowl wrapped an arm around Mesothulas's shoulders, squeezing him. "He's happy."

Mesothulas flung himself at Ostaros, threw his arms around him, and sobbed harder. Ostaros blinked in bewilderment. Mesothulas groped behind himself with one hand until he found Prowl's wrist and tugged him into the hug.

Prowl hesitantly hugged them both, then looked up at Ostaros. "Just, um, make an unhappy sound if you want us to let go."

Ostaros looked down at Mesothulas for a moment, thoughtfully, then gave Prowl another vaguely contented smile.

"You're so beautiful," Mesothulas sobbed. "Look at you, you're—you're miraculous, a living wonder—" He broke down into incoherent sounds again.

Prowl rested his head on Mesothulas's shoulder, forehead pressed to his tire, and smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Hey was that entire last scene just a direct ripoff of Frankenstein?" No no no. It was a ripoff of _Young_ Frankenstein.
> 
> This is it! The end! Thank you all so much for reading! Maybe we'll be back sometime soon for a sequel, goodness knows I left enough sequel hooks for it. In the meantime, y'all are welcome to hang out with me over on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com).
> 
> And feel free to leave a comment before you go, I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts at the end. :)

**Author's Note:**

> Fic updates will also be posted on [tumblr](http://ckret2.tumblr.com). Feel free to like/reblog update posts there and send in any comments or questions you have—I'll reply to any I can that don't spoil future chapters before they're posted! (Of course, I'll also happily take comments here. ouo)


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